All the Flowers in Paris

 

All the Flowers in Paris by Sarah Jio     291 pages

In 2009, when Caroline awakes in a Paris hospital, she has no idea where, or who, she is. Luckily the police and emergency personnel were able to identify her by her ID. She knows where she lives and her name and that’s about it. When she’s well enough, she is taken home. The doctors say that her memory may or may not come back. Her life stories may come back in pieces, or may come back bits at a time, if it comes back at all. She has dreams of a man and a little girl named Alma, but nothing else in her life seems familiar.

The novel then switches to 1943. Celine helps her father run a local flower shop. The Nazis are entering Paris, making it extremely difficult for her to feel safe and to keep her father and daughter safe. She wishes her love, Luc, would come hope from the battlefields, but that isn’t bound to happen anytime soon. And the fact that there is some Jewish ancestry in her family, Celine and her family are in danger of being exposed to the Nazis.

Caroline tries to reconstruct her life. She eats most of her meals at a nearby restaurant, where the staff know her, but she doesn’t recognize a single face.

The woman who now comes in is a much, much different person than the restaurant staff usually incur. There is something much more mellow about her. The chef/owner takes an interest in Caroline. They both feel an attraction to each other, but Caroline is reluctant to enter into a romantic relationship, knowing that there is so much she doesn’t know about herself.

Then Caroline finds a stack of letters from a woman named Celine who onced lived in her apartment. As she tries to learn the deep secrets her home is hiding, she becomes more and more aware of her strange dream and the way people treat her. The twist on what would seem a run-of-the-mill plot has me flipping back through the novel, and saying under my breath, “No. No. No.” I didn’t see it coming until it happened.Well done, Sarah Jio, well done.

I loved this novel.  “All the Flowers in Paris” receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.