France
The past few weeks I’ve been attempting to whittle away at my TBR pile. I picked up The Beekeeper’s Promise a year or so ago because I liked the cover and I have a thing for bees. I’m so glad I did. The Beekeeper’s Promise is a moving tale of life in Nazi-occupied France during WWII. Written ...
Classic literature takes center stage in Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, the story of one girl’s search for the woman who inspired several of Lord Byron’s epic poems.
Khayyam Macquet believes she has just tanked her university career - and in typical teenage hyperbole can’t help wondering i ...
Mayra Cuevas’ Salty, Bitter, Sweet is a sharply etched and unforgettable tale of an expat American teenager trying to find her way in France. It’s a beautifully done life study that knows what it’s talking about when it speaks of food, family and love alike, with a heroine who’s unforgetta ...
Uncovering the Merchant’s Secret is a lot more tough-minded than the last two Hobbes novels I’ve read – and a lot darker. It’s also very entertaining, with the most fascinating heroine I’ve read about recently, and is set in a period I’ve not often come across in historical romance. Wh ...
Powerhouse authors Beatriz Williams, Karen White, and Lauren Willig have teamed up for their third collaboration, a triple timeline story about three women whose lives are inexplicably bound up in the somewhat tragic history of Paris' Ritz Hotel. The sweeping tale spans fifty years, introducing read ...
I discovered author Delaney Diamond last year with Do Over from her Brooks Family series, a delightful romance between a billionaire heiress and a police officer that garnered Desert Isle Keeper status. While Two Nights in Paris doesn't rise to that level, it's another enjoyable look at the wealthy ...
After a few recent forays into contemporary romance, Joanna Chambers returns to historicals and to the city of Edinburgh for her latest novel, Gentleman Wolf, the first in her Capital Wolves Duet. As the title suggests, this is a story with a touch of the paranormal, although the paranormal elemen ...
B+
Take magic and romance, mix in the tumult of Paris on the eve of revolution, and you’ll get the historical fiction delight that is Enchantée. Gita Trelease’s début young adult novel is an enchanting romp through the streets of Paris in 1789 in which magic literally winds through the city and t ...
How about a fairy tale where the heroine is the fairy godmother and the prince needs a beautiful gown? Prince Sebastian of Belgium is hiding a secret: he loves wearing gowns, and dreams of donning something more bold and glamorous than his mother’s old castoffs. When he sees a ballgown by seamstre ...
Shana Galen continues her Scarlet Chronicles series of novels set in the early days of the French Revolution with Taken by the Rake, in which a young Englishwoman - who happens to be a talented forger – working with the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel in order to provide suitably ‘authentic’ d ...