From Paris in the 1920s to London after the Blitz, two women find that a secret from their past reverberates through years of joy and sorrow....
As recovery from World War II begins, expat American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There, she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter’s life. Lee suffers from what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee’s magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will Nora’s reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals…and break years of silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and the worst that life can offer?
A novel of freedom and frailty, desire and daring, The Beautiful American portrays the extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional women.
I won a paperback copy of this novel from a giveaway contest hosted by France Book Tours. This review in its entirety was originally posted at eclectictales.com: http://www.eclectictales.com/blog/2015/04/24/review-the-beautiful-american/
Suffice to say the opening scene really grabbed my attention and left me curious to know more about Nora and Lee, what brought them into each other’s social cirlces, and what drove them apart. I really felt for Nora and everything that happened to her throughout this novel. She’s surrounded by artists embroiled in varying degrees of self-importance/self-indulgence/artistic angst/submerged in their craft but she's very reliable, very solid, and keeps the other characters grounded. She’s also strong too, from her mother’s treatment of her growing up, Jamie’s actions, Lee’s actions, the Second World War. Despite of everything, she still loves France and she still perseveres.
Lee is just as complex a character, surviving a childhood trauma and emerging a celebrated photographer. It can easy to write her off as careless and living in the moment, for a good time, but there’s so much more to her character that Nora catches glimpses of. She’s such a contrast to Nora and yet you can see why their relationship worked the way it did.
I love the Paris setting, that sense of possibility and all of the art that surrounded Nora’s life during her time there and in their company. I loved her scenes with Pablo Picasso. I was honestly surprised at how much the book looked in on Nora’s life during the war and surviving in southern France, I thought there would’ve been a time jump to the post-war period and running into Lee. Nonetheless it was interesting, and presents the complexity that was living during war and immediately after the war with the way people behaved, good and bad.
In the end I really enjoyed reading The Beautiful American. Readers of historical fiction will want to check out this novel!
