{"id":5111,"date":"2023-08-03T05:14:24","date_gmt":"2023-08-03T12:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=5111"},"modified":"2023-08-03T05:14:24","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T12:14:24","slug":"rhys-bowen-the-paris-assignment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/rhys-bowen-the-paris-assignment\/","title":{"rendered":"Rhys Bowen: The Paris Assignment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Rhys Bowen is one of the best in the biz when it comes to narrative – I think her closest peer may be Harlan Coben.\u00a0 With both writers, picking up one of their books means you will be subsumed by exquisite storytelling that\u2019s impossible to look away from. Rhys Bowen trends more toward historical fiction rather than Coben\u2019s domestic suspense model, so if that\u2019s your jam, you can\u2019t go wrong nabbing a copy of her latest book, The Paris Assignment.<\/em><\/p>\n

The story begins in 1931 Paris, when young Sorbonne students Madeline Grant and Giles Martin meet.\u00a0 Madeline is shy and sheltered, and Giles, the son of French nobility, is at home in Paris.\u00a0 Madeline, at the Sorbonne for a semester away from her English college, hadn\u2019t even dared to leave her hostel when Giles scoops her up and introduces her to the world of coffee shops, politics, friends, and fine food.\u00a0 Well, you may guess where this is going \u2013 it\u2019s 1931, but \u2013 it\u2019s Paris! \u2013 and before long Madeline is pregnant.\u00a0 Giles marries her, despite being disowned by his family, and the only support they have left is Madeline\u2019s elderly French aunt.<\/p>\n

Madeline\u2019s father and her controlling stepmother aren\u2019t too pleased with her decision to remain in France, but Madeline\u2019s mother was French, and she feels an affinity for the city.\u00a0 She, Giles, and baby Olivier become a happy family unit, something brought to an end by the Nazi occupation of Paris.\u00a0 Giles sends Madeline back to England for safety, but her parents live in London, and the blitz is on, so safety isn\u2019t on the menu.\u00a0 Madeline decides to send Olivier out to the countryside with his school where he\u2019ll be safe.\u00a0 Thanks to a mix up and a tragedy, Olivier is presumed dead, and Madeline, heartbroken, agrees to enter espionage work.\u00a0 She\u2019s taken north to Scotland for training, wanting revenge on the Germans who took her son from her.\u00a0 She rarely hears from Giles who is working with the resistance in France.<\/p>\n

Olivier, meanwhile, thanks to the mix up, thinks his family is dead, and during WWII many British orphans were sent to Australia.\u00a0 Oliver ends up at an orphanage run by nuns who are straight out of Joan Aiken\u2019s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. <\/em>There were no nuns in Aiken\u2019s book but the fictional treatment of the children in that book is not as cruel as the apparently actual treatment by the Australian nuns (there\u2019s a short historical note at the end). The children are underfed, underclothed, overworked, and punished at the drop of a hat.<\/p>\n

Madeline meanwhile is finding war work in occupied France equal parts nerve wracking and rewarding, and a series of terrible events leads to some horrific treatment at the hands of the Gestapo. The narrative won\u2019t let up and it\u2019s more than sustained by the characters of Madeline and Olivier, both of whom practically leap off the page and into your reading brain.\u00a0 This was a great read, full of history, heartbreak and some ultimately (mostly) positive outcomes.\u00a0 The book ends, but I could have kept on reading to discover more about my new fictional friends Madeline and Olivier.\u00a0 Long may the pen of the talented Bowen be a busy one. — Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Rhys Bowen is one of the best in the biz when it comes to narrative – I think her closest peer may be Harlan Coben.\u00a0 With both writers, picking up one of their books means you will be subsumed by exquisite storytelling that\u2019s impossible to look away from. Rhys Bowen trends more toward historical fiction … 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":[352,10,1281,334,839,53,1282,149],"class_list":["post-5111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-austrailia","tag-historical","tag-lake-union","tag-paris","tag-resistance","tag-rhys-bowen","tag-the-paris-assignment","tag-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111","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=5111"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5164,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5111\/revisions\/5164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}