Review: The Last Time I Saw Paris by Lynn Sheene

I love books that take place in France (hence, the name of the blog).  And I really loved reading Lynn Sheene's The Last Time I Saw Paris.  It starts in 1940, when Claire runs away from a life of lies in New York City to start anew in Paris.  She had planned on living with a former lover, but ends up fending for herself because of her pride.  An older French woman sees something in Claire when the American stops to admire flowers at her flower shop, and soon Claire has a job as the assistant of the flower shop.  But then everything turns upside down when the Nazis occupy Paris.  Claire has experience getting herself into high society, and she starts to use her talent to help the French Resistance.  But when she starts to have feelings for one of her fellow Resistance workers, things get complicated.  Soon, Claire has to flee Paris.  Does she have what it takes to someday get back to the city she loves, and also the man she loves?

This book combines three of my favorite things:  France.  World War II.  And a cute love story.  So I read this pretty quickly and really enjoyed it.  I adore reading about/watching anything about the French Resistance.  The people who were a part of it were just ordinary people like you and me who were trying to do their bit for their country when it was taken over by Nazi Germany.  These people were SO brave.  And I loved seeing Claire change from being a pretty selfish young woman who loves jewels (and seducing men to get gifts from them and to get into the best parties) to being a brave woman who actually cares about others and risks her own life for them.  Loved that.  Loved it loved it loved it.  It's a pretty slow change, but it is definitely noticeable.  I actually wasn't too fond of Claire as a character in the beginning, because I thought she was kind of a b***h.  But by the end I absolutely adored her. 

My favorite character by far though was Madame Palain, the woman who owns the flower shop.  She was what Claire thought of as the "typical older French woman", but she was so refined and lady like without being outrageous like Claire.  Claire even tries to emulate her eventually.  Madame Palain is so graceful, and although she usually seems like a hard old lady, she's actually got a very warm heart.  She was my favorite character and even though I finished this book a while ago, I still find myself thinking about Madame Palain.  After all, she knows what's really important when your life and your city is in turmoil.  No matter what was going on in Paris, Madame Palain made sure to keep her shop open and to work hard. 

I also loved how this book takes place right in the middle of the Occupation.  I don't know how accurate it's portrayed, because I haven't really read/seen anything else about what it was really like to live in Paris during this time, but it seemed so real to me.  These people were living in an occupied city, but they were still proud to be Parisian and wouldn't let anyone take that away from them.

The only real beef I had with the book was the ending.  I liked how it ended, I just thought the last bit happened way too fast.  Like that last chapter was rushed.  I think I would have been much more affected by that last chapter if it had gone a little slower.

All in all, I really enjoyed reading The Last Time I Saw Paris.  It's the kind of book I love to curl up with on the weekend and read in just a few sittings.  For more info on the book and the author, go to Lynne Sheene's website. 

Review: I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells

I Am Not a Serial Killer is the story of John, a teenager living in a small town.  John is not your typical teenager though.  He is a sociopath and knows that he is just one step away from becoming a serial killer.  To control himself, he lets himself read about famous serial killers while following a strict set of rules he's developed for himself, such as not to follow people around too much and to compliment someone who is getting on him nerves and making him angry.  Because John knows so much about serial killers, he is the first in his little town to realize that the two murders that have just occured are actually the work of a serial killer and not just random killings.  John decides to find out who the killer is, not realizing that it's actually a demon intent on keeping its secret, even if it means killing John and his mother to do so.  John has to face his own inner demon if he wants to protect himself and his family.

So this was an great edge-of-your-seat book, though it was not at all what I expected it to be.  I thought it would be a pretty typical cut and dry serial killer crime novel, with John the could-be serial killer as an added special twist.  I wasn't expecting the serial killer to actually really be a demon.  It was super well done, though I know it probably wouldn't appeal to everyone.  The demon aspect and how it all leads into the story actually reminded me of one of my favorite tv shows ever, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (minus, of course, Buffy and her Sunnydale crew..like my beautiful Giles..).  So I ate it up.  If you're not much into supernatural twists in regular crime novels, then this probably won't be something you'd like. 

I really, really, really loved that John was the narrator.  I loved getting inside of his head (which is probably a result of watching way too much Criminal Minds, but hey..) and seeing how he thought.  It was great when he was trying to profile the serial killer in his town.  To be fair, I'm not at all an expert on sociopathy or what exactly it is.  I know the basics, but I couldn't tell you how accurate John and his thoughts were portrayed.  So if it's completely inaccurate, I'm sure it would really bug anyone who has studied it.  But I loved it :)  John knows he's very different from other people.  He has no emotions really toward anyone, except sometimes anger, yet he really tries to be normal for his mom.  Also, John seems like he's genuinely afraid of who/what he could potentially become.  He knows he's capable of some pretty sick stuff, so he doesn't let himself think about a lot of things.  Like I said above, he has a strick set of rules that keep him in line.  He has to start breaking some of these once he discovers who the killer is and decides to stop him once and for all, and the interal struggle that John has to deal with was to me one of the best parts of the book.  I also thought it was interesting that John's family owns the town's only funeral parlor and he is a bit obsessed with the embalming part of it..

I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes a good murder mystery with a supernatural twist :) 

Some fave quotes:

Page 98: At the mercy of the elements the opposite happens: your body slows, your thoughts grow sluggish, and you realize just how mechanical you really are.  Your body is a machine, full of tubes and valves and motors, of electrical signals and hydraulic pumps, and they function properly only within a certain range of conditions.  As temperatures drop, your machine breaks down.  Cells begin to freeze and shatter; muscles use more energy to do less; blood flows too slowly, and to the wrong places.  Your senses fade, your core temperature plummets, and your brain fires random signals that your body is too weak to interpret or follow.  In that state you are no longer a human being, you are a malfunction-an engine without oil, grinding itself to pieces in its last futile effort to complete its last meaningless task.

Page 166: In my biology class, we'd talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow.  Dogs do, rocks don't; trees do, plastic doesn't.  Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive.  It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon.  Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own.  Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates.  Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are-brighter, hottor, more sure of itself and where it wants to go.  Fire doesn't settle; fire doesn't tolerate; fire doesn't "get by".  Fire does.

(A funny joke.  I thought it was hilarious but it took me at least 10 minutes to figure it out) Page 191: "Two women walked into a bar," Said Mom.  "The first one looked at the other one and said, 'I didn't see it either.'"

Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

What can I really say about The Year of the Flood that hasn't been said before?  Margaret Atwood is brilliant.  I love her.  This was my first time reading her and I can promise you it will not be my last.  In fact, it's been really hard not to go out and buy every single book she's ever written.

I'm sure most of you already know what this book is about.  It's set some time in the future (though everything seems so believable that it really could be just years from now), and the whole story is kind of hard to explain.  It's told by two characters, Ren and Toby, and they flipflop between the present (after the "waterless flood" has come and killed most of humanity) and the past, when the two of them met through God's Gardeners, which is sort of like a religious cult but not really a cult.  It's hard to describe, so don't read my description and think "well, this sounds boring".  Because I'm horrible at describing this story.

I didn't realize until after I finished the book that it's part of a series, which is awesome.  I think Oryx and Crake is the first book?  Which is interesting, because they both make a little cameo in The Year of the Flood. So as you can see, even if you haven't started with book one, the book makes sense.  I understood everything that was going on and I think it makes a great stand-alone book.  The world was just so believable.  Which makes a great dystopian.  Because I hate reading dystopian with a good story line but a world that makes you think "yeah, no.  That's not real." 

This is obviously more of a gush that a review.  I loved it.  LOVED it.  Toby was my favorite character because she is so strong, so much stronger than she gives herself credit for.  And I kept thinking, if I'm ever in a similar situation, I hope I can be like Toby.

Have you read this or any of Atwood's other books?  Your thoughts?  Did you adore it like I did?

I don't even have any awesome quotes to share (Atwood's writing is top notch) because I was enjoying the book so much that I didn't even think to stop to underline.

Review: Tout Sweet by Karen Wheeler

Tout Sweet is a memoir of author Karen Wheeler's spur of the moment idea to buy a house in the French countryside and then move there to renovate the house.  I, of course, loved it.  Especially since she moved to the same region of France that I used to live in, Poitou-Charentes, and she talks about some cities I know.  Like, for instance, La Rochelle, where I lived.  She had unhappy experiences in La Rochelle though, mainly because it reminded her of happy times spent there with her exboyfriend.  Still, what's not to love?!

This was a quick, easy read and if you love memoirs about people quitting their day jobs and moving to France, you will love it, like I did.  I loved how honest Wheeler was about everything.  She knows she has flaws, and she writes about them and how they affect her when she first moves to the tiny little village in France from London.  For instance, what's a former fashion writer going to do with all of her insanely high and impractable designer shoes?  Or her designer clothing?  I was laughing when reading about the day she moved in to her new house (which needed a ton of work!), because she didn't even own the right kind of clothes for doing housework. 

It was interesting as well to see how her relationship developed with the other locals, French and British expats alike.  It seems she ended up making a lot of really great and close friends who she probably still sees regularly.  There was also some drama with a few of her friends while she was renovating the house.  It was hilarious, but also kind of sad, since, ya know, the drama probably really did go down, since this is, ya know, a memoir.  But hey, she's got some entertaining friends in that tiny little French village. 

I did get a bit annoyed at how much she referenced her exboyfriend throughout the book.  She just could not seem to let him go.  But honestly, this is a real person we're talking about who had real feelings for this guy who really broke her heart.  And honestly, I would probably act the same way and think about my ex as much as she does, especially when she first moves to France.  That's one of the things that I have to learn with memoirs.  If I'm getting annoyed because the writer is talking a lot about a difficult time in her life, I need to remind myself more often that, hello Kelly, this really happened and it's a real person who has real feelings.  I also kept waiting for a super happy ending where expat meets Prince Charming and lives happily ever after.  But, as I stated up above, this is a memoir.  So things don't always go smoothly and happily like in novels.  And I love happy endings.  Though while there may not be a Prince Charming waiting for Karen at the end of this book, there is a home.  She does feel like she belongs with her new friends in her new village.  And that's worth the read, and it's worth all the trouble she went through to renovate her house.

This book made me so homesick for France, but it also made me reflect on the great times I had there, so I had a really happy, warm feeling inside while reading it.  But what I didn't like?  Karen needs to stop talking about eating her pain au chocolat from the local boulangerie every. single. morning.  Because that's just too painful for a girl who used to do the same. exact. thing.  *sigh*

Check out Karen Wheeler's blog at http://www.toutsweet.net/

Some favorite quotes:

Page 27: The three of us walked over to Rue St. Benoit, a narrow, cobbled street just off the main square.  The house, a two-up, two-down with a garage attached, was shuttered up and uninviting.  It had an ugly gray exterior and the shutters were painted sludgy brown, rather than the pale blue-gray of the textbook style francaise.  The front door, made from etched yellow glass and wrought iron, was also a long way from anyone's idea of the charming French house.  But, even before Victor opened the front door, I knew that I was looking at my future.

Page 219: I stand silent in the kitchen for another ten minutes, caught in a conversational crossfire, before we all slowly start to edge toward the door.  No one wants to be the first across the threshold.  It's a scene I have witnessed many times at French gatherings, where it's important to give the impression that you are tearing yourself away under duress.  A typical exit procedure might go like this: first you announce your intention to leave and ten minutes later you might stand up.  You remain here for a minimum of five minutes, preferably ten, before slowly edging out of the room and advancing toward the door as reluctantly as possible.  Throughout this process, you must maintain a lively discourse with your hosts.  Then comes the cheek-kissing, followed by some more conversation on the doorstep.  Only then can you make your getaway.  Having watched my French friends do it many times, I have realized that there is a real art to this-the subtle dance of the long, graceful good-bye.