Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Ida Cook’s Safe Passage

I posted a partial rant, and a partial wave of enthusiasm over on Vulpes Libris today, on Ida Cook’s (reprinted) memoir We Followed Our Stars, now calling itself (annoyingly) Safe Passage. Go there to discover the tangled web of marketing versus editorial, the heroic imaginative rescue of 29 Jews from pre-WW2 Austria and Germany, and a passion for opera that made globe-trotters of two ordinary sisters from London. Ida Cook found a second career as a prolific and very popular Mills & Boon novelist, and was one of the founders of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. Her memoir is an excellent book that the publicists would like readers to assume is a ‘new’ story, when in fact it’s been in print since 1950.