The AAR Seventeen in 17 Reading Challenge – (Belated) May Update

Bouncing back to the Cocktail Challenge…

French Connection – Read a book set in France,or a book about police officers as in the movie The French Connection.

For this part of the challenge, I selected Anita Hughes’ Christmas in Paris, published in 2016.

This book is supposed to be a novel, but I seriously wasn’t sure if I was reading a novel, a travelogue, a food blog, or a high-end, brand name catalog, like Hammacher Schlemmer or the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog. It certainly felt like a Parisian infomercial in novel form.

First, the plot details: Isabel Lawson, a well-to-do American financial analyst from the Philadelphia Main Line, and Alec Braxton, a French illustrator of children’s books, meet at a luxury hotel in Paris. They are each staying in separate honeymoon suites, alone. Isabel, just days earlier, had called off her wedding to a fellow bank executive when he decided to uproot his life to take over his grandparents’ farm without conferring with her. Alec’s own wedding was called off when his beautiful, sophisticated fiancée threw him over for an Australian soccer player. Based on their mutual heartbreaks, the two begin to bond. Together, they explore the city’s many sites, they eat, they shop, and talk about their lives, while in repeated flashback, we learn of the two weddings Isabel has called off in her past and of Alec’s doomed relationship with the sophisticated Celine. On the one hand, these two are growing closer. On the other, they are also pulled apart both by Alec’s reluctance to tell Isabel everything about his family and why he may need to get married asap, and by Isabel’s sudden fierce focus on a fortune teller’s prediction that leads her into the arms of a different man.

As I hinted above, the author of this story puts a great deal of effort in documenting every tourist site and society event our characters attend, while describing their clothes, their brand name shopping, and the food they eat in minute detail. While the latter peaked the curiosity of my foodie heart, the rest of it bogged down the narrative far too much. As for the story itself, I had a somewhat difficult time appreciating the heroine. Even though Isabel is supposed to be a practical, by the numbers person who justly earned her position in life, throughout the story she appears much more flighty, impressed by appearances, and swayed by happenstance. Now, I get that 1) this story is supposed to be somewhat “magical” and 2) Isabel purposely decides to forego her usual well planned approach to life, butto me, Isabel seemed to be as driven to be open to the fates as she had been driven to plan out every move of her life. It just left me wanting to knock her over the head at what she was missing right in front of her. Frankly, Alec, the hero, saves this story and I wish he’d been in a better book. Alec is a true beta hero. He has his fears and faults, which he has no trouble admitting. He stands up against the bullies in his life, even though he’s been knocked down many times, and he has personal integrity. He comes up with a solution to his problems that makes sense and doesn’t go against his principles and while it would’ve been nice to see him get everything he deserved, monetarily, he did earn love and respect.

For Alec, I will give this book a gentleman’s C, but I do think the author has missed her calling and should think about authoring travel books for the well to do.

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The Cocktail Challenge – 6 down, 4 to go.
Alphabet Challenge – 5 down, 5 to go. (B, G, H, J, & M)

Returning to the Alphabet Challenge…

I thought I would tackle the letter “M” this time by picking up the first book in Joanna Shupe’s “Knickerbocker Club” series, titled Magnate, which was published in 2016.

I actually started this book before the RT Booklovers’ Convention. But, everyone knows that no one actually reads during a book convention, so I ended up finishing it when I returned home. This is just to point out that it took me a bit longer to read this story, then it would’ve normally but it was no reflection on its quality.

Magnate is set in 1887-88 in New York City. We are in the midst of the Gilded Age and our hero, Emmett Cavanaugh, is the owner of a steel empire which he took over after climbing out of poverty and lawlessness. Emmett is a tough man who skirts ethical boundaries and doesn’t allow himself much tenderness or sentiment, except when it comes to his younger siblings who he has tried to protect and uplift in a way his parents couldn’t and wouldn’t. Even though he now operates in and around New York’s high society, he is not a part of it, so Emmett is surprised when he is approached by Elizabeth Sloane who was born into an old monied family which owns railroads. However, this is not a social call. Elizabeth’s goal is to attain Emmett’s backing for a stock brokerage firm run by Elizabeth herself. Knowing she could never get the support of her elder brother, who runs the family business, or any of their friends, Elizabeth decides to take her affinity and love for the stock market directly to someone who has no regard for the social niceties or traditional roles and who might help her out. She also has concerns about how her brother is running their railroad and hopes to make money to bolster their fortune. Since Emmett has no love lost for Elizabeth’s brother or their kind, he takes on her challenge and decides to be the public face of her new business just to spite him. Before long, Emmett and Elizabeth’s business connections lead to more personal connections, which threatens to bring scandal to the family … unless their ties become formalized.

This story has many things that I enjoy in an historical: the Gilded Age period in the U.S. with its focus on the intermingling of the new American aristocracy with bold entrepreneurs, innovators, and social climbers. A heroine who has smarts and is bucking traditional roles for women and a man who is willing to help her. I enjoyed all these elements, but I felt not enough emphasis was placed on Elizabeth’s business as a business and, as such, took away from that element of the story. And, of course, both characters seem bound and determined to misunderstand each other and think the worst of their actions. The story had the promise of something more but fell back on older tropes. That being said, I enjoyed the set up and the historical events that were brought in to move the action along. I look forward to reading the next two books in the series. The second one, titled Baron, focuses on Elizabeth’s brother and, I gather, the third one, Mogul, focuses on a friend and business acquaintance. (I do wish one of the stories featured Emmett’s brother – a doctor who has an injured leg and helps the poor – but maybe that’s something for the future.)
I would give this book a B+.

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The Cocktail Challenge – 5 down, 5 to go.
Alphabet Challenge – 5 down, 5 to go. (B, G, H, J, & M)

Thank you, all, for your kind words and prayers. There’s been little change in Eliza’s condition; she remains in the ICU on a ventilator. The prognosis is not good, but there remains hope.

~HBO