{"id":3522,"date":"2020-01-13T03:32:41","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T11:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3522"},"modified":"2020-01-13T03:34:54","modified_gmt":"2020-01-13T11:34:54","slug":"beatiz-williams-lauren-willig-karen-white-all-the-ways-we-said-goodbye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/beatiz-williams-lauren-willig-karen-white-all-the-ways-we-said-goodbye\/","title":{"rendered":"Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig & Karen White: All the Ways We Said Goodbye"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Williams, Willig and White, three bestselling authoresses who write historical adventures, romances and mysteries, have teamed up for the third time to write a wonderfully rich novel with a through line of the Paris Ritz.\u00a0 Being a hotel brat myself, I enjoyed this method of tying the novel together.\u00a0 It has three separate storylines, each focused on a different woman – one in 1914, one in 1942, and one in 1964.\u00a0 In the two earlier storylines, there\u2019s a woman who lives in a suite at the Ritz. She\u2019s the first character\u2019s mother and the second character\u2019s grandmother.\u00a0 The tie the third woman has to the first two is more tenuous and is one of the mysterious threads of the novel.<\/p>\n

In each thread, the elegant Ritz stands as a beacon of glorious civilization, populated by the kind of service people who give exquisitely polite and perfect service and then fade into the background.\u00a0 It\u2019s the touchstone for all the characters as they jump off into life or come back to the Ritz for comfort.<\/p>\n

Aurelie, in 1914, finds herself bored with her mother\u2019s salon of poets and novelists and after she drops her boyfriend off at the front, she takes off to the family castle in the French countryside.\u00a0 Through all the story threads, there\u2019s a fabulous talisman \u2013 some might call it the McGuffin of the novel \u2013 a jewel encrusted bauble covering a remnant of cloth soaked in Joan of Arc\u2019s blood.\u00a0 The legend is that if the Demoiselle de Corcelles (which is Aurelie and in a later iteration, Daisy) holds the talisman France cannot fall.<\/p>\n

The Germans are up close and personal in Aurelie\u2019s story, requisitioning her family castle and taking all the food and supplies from the surrounding village.\u00a0 The Germans of 1914 don\u2019t seem that different from the Paris occupiers of 1942, where we find Daisy, Aurelie\u2019s daughter, married to a boring functionary who is tight with the Nazis.\u00a0 She finds herself pressed into resistance work and love ultimately makes her reckless.<\/p>\n

The third woman, the recently widowed Babs, lives on a beautiful estate.\u00a0 She\u2019s incredibly lonely and when she gets a letter asking her to meet an American at the Ritz in Paris to attempt to discover the identity of La Fleur, the famous French resistance fighter, she agrees, more or less surprising herself. This third segment of the novel is the lightest in tone, and Babs, clad in tweeds and brogues, is immediately taken under the wing of a stylish American named Precious and given a complete makeover.<\/p>\n

All three stories have a serious love element, often a forbidden one, and the tension and heartbreak of wartime France is beautifully illuminated by the three authors.\u00a0 There\u2019s a love of history, of setting, and of character on the part of the writers that thread the book together as much as the Ritz Hotel does.\u00a0 This is a gloriously entertaining novel, one to sink into on a long winter\u2019s night.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Williams, Willig and White, three bestselling authoresses who write historical adventures, romances and mysteries, have teamed up for the third time to write a wonderfully rich novel with a through line of the Paris Ritz.\u00a0 Being a hotel brat myself, I enjoyed this method of tying the novel together.\u00a0 It has three separate storylines, each … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[290,292,10,293,131,294,295,291],"class_list":["post-3522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-all-the-ways-we-said-goodbye","tag-beatriz-williams","tag-historical","tag-karen-white","tag-lauren-willig","tag-paris-ritz","tag-wartime-france","tag-william-morrow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3522"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3525,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3522\/revisions\/3525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}