A Week in Paris

September 1, 2016

Fay Knox visits Paris on a high school trip and can't help feeling that she has been there before. Unbeknownst to Fay, her entire English childhood has been created by her mother, Kitty, in order to protect her from the family tragedies that occurred in World War II Paris. Five years after her first visit, Fay is planning to return to Paris as a violinist in an orchestra when she is told that her mother has been hospitalized for an overdose. Kitty is finally ready to give her daughter the key to the truth. A little rucksack hidden in a closet will lead Fay on a search for answers during her week in the City of Light. The novel switches back and forth from Kitty's life in Paris starting in 1937 and Fay's search in 1961. While abroad, both mother and daughter find love, but Fay will also learn about the devastating tragedies that her mother wanted her to forget. VERDICT Hore's (The Dream House) story of love, loss, and resilience is a page-turner full of romance and period detail. Recommended for historical fiction collections.--Catherine Coyne, Mansfield P.L., MA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2016
Hore, author of A Place of Secrets (2012), again proves her talent for combining history and generational family drama in parallel stories, adding hints of romance and psychic ability to form an intensely compelling story. Readers spend a week in 1960s Paris with Fay, a talented young violinist who falls for a journalist and discovers the secrets her depressed mother withheld from hersecrets about her father's death in occupied Paris and how she and her mother escaped. Fay's prestigious musical career plays second fiddle to her search for the truth about her parents as she tracks down people they knew and what happened to them. Suspenseful and absorbing, the story dramatizes the gamut of French experiences during WWII: rationing and near-starvation, fear of an invading German army that sometimes strafed innocent citizens for sport, the incursion of refugees, and how prison camps were used to harass and brutalize British and American civilians, along with Jews. Reminiscent of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise (2006)for its immersive historical perspective, and Belinda Alexandra's Golden Earrings (2015) for the emotional richness and parallel mother-daughter story lines.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)