– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
Published by St. Martin’s Press on 04 Aug 2020
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Living through WWII working in a Paris bookstore with her young daughter, Vivi, and fighting for her life, Charlotte is no victim, she is a survivor. But can she survive the next chapter of her life?
Alternating between wartime Paris and 1950s New York publishing, Paris Never Leaves You is an extraordinary story of resilience, love, and impossible choices, exploring how survival never comes without a cost.
The story opens in 1944 Paris. Charlotte walks by a mob punishing a woman for collaboration horizontale. It’s a shockingly abrasive scene to be thrown straight into—before getting a chance to become familiar with who Charlotte is, before figuring out and settling into where we are in the war—and just as soon as we are in it, we are out of it, swept up into 1954 New York publishing, meeting Charlotte’s colleagues, trying to grasp every name because we don’t know who’s important yet.
A mysterious letter appears on Charlotte’s office desk at Gibbon & Field publishing, and the war, ten years past, comes seeping back, despite all her efforts to move past it and build a new life for her and her daughter. It doesn’t get any easier as her daughter starts asking questions about the past that Charlotte has tried so hard to shield her from.
The dual timelines eventually found their rhythm to feel slightly less disjoint, but I did get a bit of whiplash navigating between them at the beginning.
Another thing to adjust to was the lack of tension in the rest of the story, which was surprising, considering the heavy historical context and the opening scene. In a time as perilous as WWII, every cause and effect is heightened, yet the war seemed to merely occur at the periphery of Charlotte’s life—its greatest inconvenience being that it hindered an illicit romance—which came off a bit self-absorbed.
I felt like the romance distracted from the more interesting themes of survival, survivor’s guilt, motherhood, and the sociology of passing. That last theme I find especially interesting, and I would have loved for that aspect to be further explored in the characterisation of the players involved.
But maybe then I’m asking for a different story. This wasn’t the WWII fiction novel I was expecting, but this could be one for historical romance readers.