Welcome to day seven of my #FrenchVillageBookworm
Advent Calendar where I’m featuring a different book every day until Christmas.
I have been a big fan of romance
author Juliette Sobanet for many years. Her first self-published novel was the
first ebook I ever read, squinting at the tiny text on Ade’s iphone on car
journeys that I wished could have been longer. I have followed her career,
swooned my way through many of her novels and novellas, where the men
know just how to treat a lady and the France they are set in is full of
chocolate, patisseries and cobble streets paved with love. This book however is
very different and my excitement about getting my hands on a new book from her
was equally matched with apprehension at discovering the inner secrets of
Danielle, the real person behind the romance author Juliette. The fact there is
no real Juliette was a shock at first, but as a social media follower I knew
this before reading this book.
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| Day seven #FrenchVillageBookworm Advent Calendar |
Meet Me in Paris: A Memoir
is the true tale of a hopeless romantic addicted to writing, travel and France who found
herself in a marriage where she had to be someone she wasn’t for everyday life
to tick over nicely, despite loving a husband who also loved her. One day she
spread her wings, took off to experience freedom and to find the passion she
could only write about, divorcing her husband and having an affair that gave her great highs but deep lows too. She is a good example
of the torment of the creative mind who needed to flee what she feared was
slowly killing her inner soul, but the price of freedom was high. It was not
an easy journey, there were some very dark days for her when loneliness and
depression zapped her of her energy and threatened her life. There were times
when I felt very sad, times when I felt she was selfish and times I wished she
would just stop making the wrong decisions and get on a plane to France, which
she does numerous times throughout the book.
is the true tale of a hopeless romantic addicted to writing, travel and France who found
herself in a marriage where she had to be someone she wasn’t for everyday life
to tick over nicely, despite loving a husband who also loved her. One day she
spread her wings, took off to experience freedom and to find the passion she
could only write about, divorcing her husband and having an affair that gave her great highs but deep lows too. She is a good example
of the torment of the creative mind who needed to flee what she feared was
slowly killing her inner soul, but the price of freedom was high. It was not
an easy journey, there were some very dark days for her when loneliness and
depression zapped her of her energy and threatened her life. There were times
when I felt very sad, times when I felt she was selfish and times I wished she
would just stop making the wrong decisions and get on a plane to France, which
she does numerous times throughout the book.
Ultimately this book is a journey
of discovery and recovery, where Paris and Lyon try their best to soothe her
troubled mind and help her move forward to a happier place. She just needs to
work out where to find this happiness; is it in France, in her marriage, in the
arms of her lover or is there something else? Her writing certainly became very
important in her healing process and this led to an emotionally charged memoir that
contains some strong language and scenes of a sexual nature.
At the end of the book I found
myself wondering how I felt. Danielle has slightly deflated my dream of the
typical life I expected a romance novelist like Juliette Sobanet to be living, but
I can’t help but feel privileged she has shared her real life with her readers.
Characters in a novel have ups and downs before finding their happily ever
afters, real life is a different story altogether. She will always be Juliette
to me and I can’t wait for her to feel ready to write another chocolate filled romance set in France.
Meet Me in Paris: A Memoir
is available in ebook and
paperback format and links to Amazon can be found below.
is available in ebook and
paperback format and links to Amazon can be found below.
To read my reviews of her novels
click on the links below, to read the guest post she wrote for me about her novel Midnight Train to Paris click here
and for my France et Moi interview with Juliette click here.
by Laura Bradbury. This memoir is Laura’s third book about her
love of France and life in the winemaking region of Burgundy
in the east of France. This book goes back to the beginning to tell the story
of how Laura, a 17 yr old from Canada who spoke very little French, came to be
on a year long exchange in Burgundy, living with four separate host families,
attending French lycée and promising not to drive, take drugs, drink alcohol or
date boys during the year. Being sent to the heart of wine making country where
one of her first encounters with one of the families was helping with the
backbreaking grape harvest, the alcohol rule was looked on with more than a
little flexibility from the start, the other rules however were not there to be
ignored. 
a very sweet short story for children about Toby the Border Collie who
lives on Fantasy Farm, a smallholding in France. In this book Toby tells us
about the three little kittens who join his family, their antics as they
explore their new world and their first Christmas, where they enjoy playing
hide and seek in the decorated tree. There are some lovely pictures (real colour photos) of Toby and his kitten friends, which I’m sure will be enjoyed by both
children and adult readers. The kittens are lively, entertaining and get into
mischief, but Toby is on hand to help them settle into their new family and
even holds their paws as they visit the vet for the first time. He is a perfect Dog-Father to the
new little ones and happy to share his life on Fantasy Farm.
by Sophie Claire. They say you should
never judge a book by it’s cover, but it was the cover that attracted me and
once I read the synopsis, I knew I had to read it and I hoped I would love it.
I wasn’t wrong. The only thing I didn’t like about this book was that it ended;
I would have happily stayed within the pages forever.
by Steven Herrick, a travel memoir of an epic cycling holiday in Europe.
In this book we join Steven, his wife Cathie and their two bikes on what is now
their annual cycling holiday to Europe. I have been following them in spirit
over the years from Steven’s first trip 
where he cycled
from St Nazaire on the west coast of France following the Loire Valley and the
Saone River east. His writing never fails to make me smile and wish I too were
joining in their fun. Links to the other books in this series and my reviews
can be found at the bottom of this post.