This review is for the audio version of this book. As a public service announcement, I recommend that you check in with your local library to see if they support OneClickdigital or other apps that let you download audiobooks to your smartphone via library membership. I have listened to a lot of hot bestsellers this way for free! Free! The Little Paris Book Shop is about a lot of things: the love of books, the art of living, courage, delicious food, loyal friends, and second […]
What happens in Vegas results in a summer in Paris
Mia Holland goes to Las Vegas with her two best friends to celebrate her college graduation. Mia’s dream was once to become a dancer, but a nasty car accident put a stop to that dream and now she’s on track to fulfil her father’s dream for her, which is fast track through a prestigious business school in Boston. He’s even offered to help pay for her apartment there. This Vegas weekend is Mia’s last chance to cut loose, and she sure does. Mia is shy, […]
A lot of Goodreads readers liked this a lot more than I did
3.5 stars All Jasmin “Jess” Bianchi has ever wanted to do was make perfumes, like her father. The brain-child behind the massively popular Spoiled Brat, she has achieved great commercial success, but is everyone assumes that what she intended as an ironic comment on the industry is all she’s capable of. When she inherits a small perfume shop in Provence, in the same year she had to bury her father and the little artisanal perfume company she had started was bought up by the powerful […]
A really good read, but I don’t get all the fuss.
This was a really good book on a lot of levels: 1. Good as historical fiction. Excellent particularly because we get POV characters on both sides of the conflict. 2. Good as literary fiction (at least, according to my standards). I prefer my lit-fic to be on the accessible side, and not to focus exclusively on middle-aged white man problems. But it’s also got extra levels if you want to go digging. 3. Good as writing, in the sense that the sentences strung one after […]
Sex, Murder and Political Intrigue in war-time Paris
This is the latest in the series by Paul Grossman about the famous and highly respected German homicide detective Willi Kraus. Over the course of Grossman’s several earlier books which I’ve reviewed, the thuggish fringe National Socialist movement grows into the terrifying Nazi juggernaut which destroys the Germany Kraus has known and loved, and soon drives German Jews—himself and his family included—into exile. As one of the last to flee before all escape hatches were slammed shut, the widowed Kraus arrives in Paris without belongings, […]
A Million Deaths is a Statistic
I’m a bit of an accidental war tourist. I never plan these things but somehow, I’ve been to the trenches of Verdun, the reconstructed city centre of Ypres, the Passchendaele memorial museum, the D-day beaches and their immense cemeteries, the former sites of concentration camps, the battlegrounds of Malmedy. It seems important somehow, especially for someone my age, several generations comfortably removed from any world war. Yet the sheer scale of these immense cemeteries and their endless lines of identical headstones alone makes it paradoxically […]