The Paris Daughter: Two mothers. Two daughters. Two families torn apart

by Kristin Harmel

'An unmissable reading treat' Lancashire Evening Post

'Beautifully written and emotionally charged . . . impossible to put down' HAZEL GAYNOR

A heartwrenching and evocative wartime novel, perfect for fans of Santa Montefiore, Rachel Hore and Lucinda Riley.

Two mothers. Two daughters. Two families torn apart forever.

Paris, 1939. Elise and Juliette are certain nothing can come between them. So, when war breaks out and Elise is forced to flee, she entrusts Juliette with her daughter, playmate to Juliette's own little girl.

More than a year later, with the war finally ending, Elise returns to reunite with her daughter, only to find her friend's bookstore reduced to rubble - and Juliette nowhere to be found. What happened to Mathilde in those last terrible moments? Juliette has seemingly vanished without a trace, taking all the answers with her. Elise's desperate search leads her to New York - and to Juliette - one final, fateful time.

The Paris Daughter is a story about mothers and daughters, the way loss transforms us, and the roads we find to beginning anew in the face of impossible odds.

PRAISE FOR KRISTIN HARMEL:

'Kristin Harmel is firmly in the top echelon of WW2 storytellers' HEATHER MORRIS

'A master storyteller' SANTA MONTEFIORE

• ISBN10: 1802793658
• ISBN13: 9781802793659
• Publish Date: 8 June 2023 (first published 6 June 2023)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Headline Publishing Group
• Imprint: Mountain Leopard Press
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 384
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Grief And Madness. One of the things I like about this particular book, and the way it parallels my own family's life, is in showing how events during WWII can have generational impacts via creating madness - the older term for insanity, yet which feels like it applies more appropriately here - in some of the survivors of that war. Here, we see it even in two people who were far from soldiers, far from the front lines. They were simply mothers who had daughters at nearly the same time in the same city who happened to become friends... and then had that friendship tested in pretty horrific ways. But the varying types of madness we see here do a great job in showing how the war impacted different people differently, even people as connected as these two mothers were. Without giving too much away, we even see the horrors of the Holocaust a bit - and there again, we see survivors trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.

All told this was one of those books where the gut punches land heavy - but early. The "big reveal" is, in fact, rather obvious *much* earlier than the explicit reveal, and yet the way this is done works within the story being told of the varying madnesses and how these survivors are trying to cope in any way they can. So while I can't personally fault Harmel for this, I can see where other more stringent reviewers might. Even the near 400 page length works well here, never feeling bloated or too slow and instead simply packing in a *ton* of rich detail and events, many - even among the seemingly more insignificant in this tale - based on real world events and seemingly quite accurate. (The author's note in the end reveals how one particular incident within the last few pages of the book is actually the author inserting her characters into that particular moment, but otherwise being pretty close to an actual nonfiction report on the incident in question.)

Overall a truly well done, beautifully layered tale of two beautifully broken women and the impacts their choices have across decades. Very much recommended.