Escape From Paris / Stephen Harding / 206 pages

This is the true story of a small group of downed American aviators in World War II who are hidden and guided out of Nazi occupied France by the French resistance fighters.  The story specifically focuses on American Joe Cornwall and the daughter of the family sheltering him, Yvette Morin.  Yvette and her parents lived and worked at the Hotel des Invalides, a complex of buildings which includes the tomb of Napoleon.  The Morin family with the help of other resistance fighters were able to smuggle in , hide, and help downed Allied flyers escape Nazi France.  Joe Cornwall spent more time with the Morin family due to unexpected circumstances which allowed time for Yvette and Joe to fall in love.  By the time Joe is able to escape he and Yvette are engaged.  Shortly after Joe gets out of France Yvette and her parents are arrested by the Nazis for their resistance activities.  The book follows the story of what happened to Yvette and Joe during the rest of the war and after WWII ends.

Last Christmas in Paris / Hazel Gaynor & Heather Webb / 366 pages

This story takes place in England and France during World War I.  It is written in letter correspondence form between the two main characters and also their letters to minor characters.  Evie Elliott is a young woman in England who falls in love with her brother's life long best friend Thomas Harding.  Thomas goes off to war and he and Evie correspond during the entire war.  The book is broken up into sections by the years 1914 - 1918.  Their letters change over the years and the reader sees their relationship develop from just friends to a more personal and intimate relationship.

The Forbidden Rose / Joanna Bourne / 392 pgs

Joanna Bourne is a fantastic writer. I read her first two books a few years ago and then somehow never got around to reading more. When I saw that she has a new book out, I decided to catch up on the older ones as they compromise a loose series that centers on English and French spies. This one is set during the Reign of Terror in France. Marguerite (Maggie) is the daughter of an aristocrat who's been forced out of her home by a mob. She's also much more than that. William Doyle is an English spy posing as a Frenchman who discovers Maggie hiding out. In a shaky alliance, they set out for Paris together. There's a road trip, much intrigue, a prison break, and a sneak peek at a young Adrian, who is the hero of the next Bourne book I plan to read. If you like your historical romances well-researched and richly written, I recommend this one.

The Little Paris Bookshop / Nina George / 392 pgs

I just finished this book for my next book club meeting, and honestly, it was really ho-hum to me. Perhaps I'm not such a lover of French sensibilities and would have preferred the setting of England and a bit more of an uptight Englishman as the main character. Perhaps I just didn't have much empathy for a guy who had an affair with a married woman who left him over twenty years before. Perhaps I could barely relate to the books and authors mentioned in Ms. George's book. Many of the titles and books mentioned were fake, not even real, and that annoyed me. I think I'm being generous giving this book three stars. I should probably give it less, but I can't say it was the worst book I've ever read, just one that I never care to pick up again.

The book concerns a 50 year old man named Jean Perdu who runs a Literary Apothecary on a barge on the Seine in Paris. Mr. Perdu has the ability to be able to ask a few questions of a customer and instantly figure out which book will cure what ails them, even if they don't know that they have an ailment. However, Mr. Perdu's ailment is that he still grieves the woman who left him 20 years before without saying good-bye. When he finds a letter she wrote him that he never opened, he discovers that things were not as they seemed two decades before. Along with some new friends, Mr. Perdu unmoors his bookshop barge and takes it down the canals and rivers of France all the way to the Provence.

Fleur de Lies/ Maddy Hunter/ 219 pages

Fleur de Lies written by Maddy Hunter is the ninth book in the Passport to Peril series.  The reader follows Emily, and her tour group of senior citizens, up the Seine River from Normandy to Paris.  As always the case, someone dies.  Emily is joined by the usual cast of characters from the senior tour group and her ex-husband, Jack, along with some new characters.  Woody and Cal are morticians with very different ideas, Victor and Vivian are Jack's employers in the cosmetic industry, plus a woman from someones past rounds out the group.  Readers who like cozy mysteries will enjoy this book.  For more information and read a-likes visit the SCCCLD website.

Hundred-foot Journey / Richard C. Morais 245 p.

Hundred-foot Journey / Richard C. Morais 245 p.

Now a motion picture, this is the story of Hassan Haji, a boy from Mumbai, India. Hassan narrates his own story beginning with his grandfather who starts a restaurant during World War II which his father inherits. The father expands and grows the business.  When his mother dies in a fire, the entire family migrates to London.  There they languish, in sorrow, until his father takes them on a tour of Europe where they discover a small village in France.  There his father turns to what he does best, running an Indian restaurant; and, evokes the ire of the 2 star French chef.  There develops a war albeit a culinary war where Madame Mallory seeks to oust Hassan's father.  She has met her match as he counters each of her moves until a disaster happens.  Madame Mallory finds herself offering a chef position to Hassan and the die is cast for him to pursue his own Michelin stars and, ultimately, his own Parisian restaurant.  Morais rich descriptive prose gives life to the story.  The sights, sounds, and smells float off the page as he describes the trek of the Haji family from Mumbai to Paris. 

The Cleaner of Chartres: A Novel/Salley Vickers/298 pgs

What a sucker I am for fiction set in a foreign country - especially France. I was walking by the New Fiction table and this jumped into my hand. We are introduced to a young baby, a girl who has been left in a wicker basket wrapped in a white tablecloth. The farmer who found her names her Agnes (after the saint) and Morel (after his favorite mushrooms). He realizes he can't take care of the child and so gives her to the nuns. They take her in and find over time that Agnes is smart but not outstanding, sweet but not overly gracious and secretive, in a dangerous way.
  As a teenager Agnes had something happen in the apple orchard and as the book progresses we find out in bits and pieces what happened and why her life took such a sharp turn. We meet people who truly are her friends and others who are her direst enemies. Agnes is the cleaner of the title with all its connotations. I was drawn in by this haunting story and cheered for Agnes' victories and booed when the need arose. I feel as if I can walk down the streets of Chartres and find these people living there right now.
 The chapters alternate between present and past in the different cities in and around Chartres. For those in the know, Chartres is where the Notre-Dame cathedral is located. This edifice plays a significant role in the story, almost a character itself. There isn't any harsh language and a sweet love story. I heartily recommend this for someone looking for a fascinating tale that takes it's wonderful slow time to tell.
Sue D.

Six Degrees: The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro; The Lavender Garden by Lucinda Riley; The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian.

Bringing up Bebe / Pamela Druckerman / 284 pgs.

Pamela Druckermann, an American journalist writes about her time living and raising her children in France.  Druckermann, believes that French children are extremely well-behaved and eat well rounded meals without complaint; so she goes out in search of what makes this so.  The result is the very entertaining and informative book about French values and parenting styles.  Basically, Druckermann feels that Americans are overwhelmed with parenting theories and are too overprotective (ie helicopter parenting) and also to lenient with discipline so as not to crush our child's souls.  There is also a big difference on how the French view their roles as parents versus Americans.  American moms tend to give up their old identity and take on their new role as "mom".  While the French feel that they are parents, but they are still the person they were before the baby and they try to continue to cultivate that persona. 
Druckermann, feels we need to be more like the French and let our children be more independent to discover the world and to handle their own problems.  She also writes about sleeping, mealtimes, the education system, and motherhood. 

The Bad Queen / Carolyn Meyer / 420 Pages

This is the latest of Carolyn Meyer's Young Royals novels.  In this one, she chronicles the life of Marie Antoinette in a first-person journaling style. In the forward, Ms. Meyer says that she has used only real people and events in this novel, using many journals written from that time as background information.  I found it to be very believable and well-researched, which made it much more enjoyable to read.

Legacy / Danielle Steel / 326 Pages

Brigitte works for a college in the admissions dept, but wakes up to a shock when her life changes overnight. Her boyfriend of six years up and move to Egypt, and the next day she gets let go at work because a new computer system can do her job for her.  With nothing to do and no one hiring, she turns to her mother, who is tracking her family's geneaology back as far as she can.  Her mother hits a wall when she can't find any more records from before her family left France.  Brigitte, wanting to please her mother and with nothing better to do, tracks down some more records for her, first going to Salt Lake City and then South Dakota, where she discovers that one of her relatives was a Sioux Indian girl who somehow ended up in France and married a Marquis.  Now interested in the geneaological project, Brigitte flies to Paris to find out more.  While there, she meets a French professor, and they enjoy each other's company.  But after Brigitte goes back home and has no real life left, she decides to take a job in Paris, where she will have the time and resources to write a book about the little Indian girl, Wachiwi.  Several chapters of the book are about Wachiwi's life and how she was taken from her family to another tribe, meets a Frenchman, and makes it to France, where she falls in love and gets married.

While the underlying story line was interesting, I found this book to be difficult to read and very repetitive.  What took up 326 pages could have been made into a much shorter, better-written book, and I found myself getting irritated with it throughout my reading of it.  I think the characters were under-developed and could have blossomed into memorable people who felt real to the reader with a little more effort.  It was very disappointing, as I had heard the Danielle Steel books were very good.  I guess I will have to read some of the older ones to find out.