A light addition to the adventures-in-Paris genre offers cozy fun to fans of travel fiction and tender love stories.
Personal discovery pairs well with French gastronomy in Almquist’s novel about the power of friendship and the thrill of second chances.
Around 2007, after her daughter has left home, Bostonian Jane Longworth is shocked to discover that her husband doesn’t share her dream of traveling the world together. She takes an impulsive trip to Paris alone, where she befriends two other women: Englishwoman Fiona Braxton and Véronique Moreau. Their friendships, along with the magic of the French capital, help each woman grow personally and professionally. Véronique’s career at gourmet food chain store Bon Gout takes off as she oversees the opening of a London branch; she and her husband, Jean-Pierre, work through their differences about how to balance their professional ambitions with their desire to start a family. Fiona, who’d been consumed with caring for her dying mother, slowly lets go of the guilt that keeps her working at her family’s factory; she tentatively pursues a job with Véronique’s company and a relationship with Emily Spenser, a very supportive academic. Jane follows her passion for food, enrolls in cooking school in Paris, and begins a romance with Bernard Dubois, a devastatingly handsome and charming chef. Long discussions and bonding sessions between the three women are interspersed with pleasurable, if familiar, descriptions of the sights and tastes of Paris (“the tang of the tarragon and the rich buttery taste of the bearnaise”). The three women at the center of the narrative are sympathetic and relatable, and it’s easy to cheer on their joys and successes. As the story moves along, there’s a certain repetitive simplicity in the author’s belief that the City of Lights can solve any problem. Still, Almquist is perceptive about the desires and fears of women at various stages of their lives.
A light addition to the adventures-in-Paris genre offers cozy fun to fans of travel fiction and tender love stories.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780985262464
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Cafe Au Lait
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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