Elisabeth Hobbes’ Daughters of Paris is a story of intrigue, romance, and redemption. I found it to be an enjoyable if somewhat predictable read till the end of the novel, where things took a turn for the worse.

While playing in the yard of the high-end Parisian apartment building in which they live, best friends Fleur and Colette make a delightful discovery: There is a gate, hidden behind an overgrowth of vines and shrubberies. It takes all they have to push the door open and squeeze through but it is worth the effort – beyond that barrier is a small, hidden walled garden with a dilapidated greenhouse full of strawberries. The girls eat their fill and swear to keep the place a secret.

Initially, it is one of many secrets they keep between them, but as they age it isn’t long before they are keeping secrets from each other as well. Colette, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer, has a life filled with dance clubs, risque friends, endless nights out, and dashing beaus. Fleur, the orphaned niece of the housekeeper, is far more studious. Her friends are students and fellow book enthusiasts who congregate in cafés to discuss politics and reform. Where once Colette and Fleur spent all day talking to each other, their adult selves find they have nothing to say to one another.

And then the unthinkable happens and France is occupied. German soldiers sit at the café tables where Fleur and her friends used to meet. The clubs Colette frequented are now the gathering places of Nazi officers. As their nation is slowly suffocated by the enemy, Fleur and Colette once more find they have something in common – a deep desire to see France free from the fascists who have taken it over.

This novel is pretty much what one expects from a WWII tale. The brash, beautiful Colette has to adjust her life to the occupation, most specifically figuring out how she wants to deal with the invaders. She had been friends with many Germans before the war and while she hates the Nazi takeover of Paris, she also hates the thought of not frequenting her favorite clubs. She finds herself going dancing with the officers of the occupation, uneasy about what she is doing but unable to give her lifestyle up completely. Colette is somewhat selfish and silly at the start but I understood her – she’s essentially a teenager who had been raised to be an ornamental wife. She was in no way prepared for the war.

Fleur, a quiet bookworm with activist friends, quickly gets swept up in the resistance and shows that beneath her calm, sweet exterior is a core of steel. Fleur is by far the more relatable of the two – she has to work for a living, worry about where to live and how to make ends meet, and wonder how she can do her bit for France. I liked how the story shows a young woman who is afraid – she is in no way adventurous or daring – but who sets aside her fear in order to do the right thing. I also appreciated how the story contrasted the two women – one would have expected Colette, with her bold, impulsive personality, to join France’s freedom fight but she is too caught up in herself at the start to do so. She does grow and mature as the fight goes on but it takes her a while for this to happen.

I also appreciated how the author gets the tone of the occupation just right. She depicts beautifully how the French thought life would go on as normal once the fighting stopped and how they quickly learned that wasn’t true. Ms. Hobbes also shows how vindictive people used the new world order to settle old scores, falsely accusing neighbors of crimes just to watch them be hauled away for questioning. I’ve read about this in non-fiction books and it added a real touch of authenticity to see it shown here.

However, there were certain things I did not like. One was the inconsistency with locations – the secret garden seemed to practically disappear halfway through the book, even though the extra food it offered would have been a goldmine during the latter years of the occupation. Fleur initially devotes an apartment she inherits above a bookstore for use by the resistance, but changes that midway through the narrative with nary a thought to how it will affect her friends. Everyone talks too freely about their illicit activities – I understood Ms. Hobbesis using conversation to give us important information but in reality, such loose lips really would have sunk their odds of survival.

Our heroines do fall in love and I liked both heroes. The amorous affairs are introduced later in the book, which is in keeping with the attention given to Colette and Fleur’s friendship. While the romances are important and receive significant page space, the HEAs are not the focus of the story.

My big issue with the tale actually deals with a natural by-product of romantic love – pregnancy. One of our single heroines gets pregnant. When someone recommends an abortion, she slaps them. There is an emphasis on how dangerous abortion is, while childbirth (during wartime with low supplies) is treated as essentially easy and risk-free. I can certainly understand a woman wanting to keep her child and making the decision to do so even during tough times. The fact that this young woman has other options (when many didn’t in those days) and didn’t even entertain them was disconcerting to me though. I became even more uncomfortable when a second young single woman becomes pregnant, this time by a married Nazi officer, and also refuses to give up her child when she has the chance to do so. At that point, it felt that the author was making what in the U.S. would be called a firm pro-life stance. Throw in the conversation about how sorry someone is that they gave a child up for adoption and how they long to get in touch with said youngster, together with the fact that the only pro-abortion person in the text was described as frivolous and selfish and I found myself completely discombobulated. Americans are currently going through a legal battle over abortion rights and this issue has become a pivotal point in numerous elections. I have a feeling this will be a trigger issue for many readers in this part of the world, so I felt I should bring it up despite this topic occurring in the last third of the book.

Daughters of Paris was a fairly enjoyable, typical WWII romance until I encountered the above. I typically don’t give an F simply because a book takes a political stance and I am not going to do that here. However, the subject is handled poorly enough, with no examination from the alternate point of view and no discussion of the very real dangers of a wartime pregnancy, that I felt the book should be downgraded significantly as a result. Hence, what would have been a B/B- read is now a D and I assuredly don’t recommend the novel.

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