FranceBookTours -- The Chocolate Kiss Review, Interview and Giveaway

When I found out that Laura Florand's book The Chocolate Kiss was going to be on France Book Tours, I immediately asked to be included. I've read her other Chocolate books set in Paris and enjoyed them. The books are a little chick lit, a little romance, and a lot of Paris and yummy French chocolate and pastries. This one did not disappoint. I almost wished I was reading it in winter because the descriptions of the hot chocolate were so scrumptious, but summer or winter, this novel will whet your sensual appetites. It was a little racier than I remember the other one's being, but that can be enjoyable too. You don't need to read the other books in the Chocolate series to read this one. They're all independent but some of the characters reappear.
Here's the synopsis from the author:

The Heart of ParisWelcome to La Maison des Sorcieres. Where the window display is an enchanted forest of sweets, a collection of conical hats delights the eye and the habitues nibble chocolate witches from fanciful mismatched china. While in their tiny blue kitchen, Magalie Chaudron and her two aunts stir wishes into bubbling pots of heavenly chocolat chaud.
But no amount of wishing will rid them of interloper Philippe Lyonnais, who has the gall to open one of his world famous pastry shops right down the street. Philippe’s creations seem to hold a magic of their own, drawing crowds of beautiful women to their little isle amidst the Seine, and tempting even Magalie to venture out of her ivory tower and take a chance, a taste…a kiss.
Parisian princesses, chocolate witches, patissier princes and sweet wishes—an enchanting tale of amour et chocolat. 

The magical aspect of the chocolate making kind of reminded me of Chocolat by Joanne Harris. This was a quick read and a delightful escape to Paris and romance.
I was fortunate to get to interview author Laura Florand. Make sure to enter the paperback copy of the book giveaway in the link at the bottom of this post for U.S. readers only.

Interview with Author Laura Florand: 

Laura,

Thanks for taking the time to answer my interview questions.

Q.    Your books feature fabulous scenes in Paris. When did you fall in love with Paris? Do you live there or travel there often? I always say that France (most notably Paris) is a culture that appropriated me. Although I majored in French in college, I had considerable resistance to France itself. My Fulbright year was to Tahiti, my graduate studies were going to be in Francophone culture. Then I spent my first year in Paris as a graduate assistant, and France just sucked me in. I fell in love with my husband there, and he helped me fall in love with Paris, too, and pretty soon I was meeting all his enormous and fascinating family, giving up my studies to stay there with him, we were getting married, and eighty percent of my life was, and still to this day is, lived in French. (I’m also a professor of French at Duke now.) I had fallen down the rabbit hole into this marvelous, powerful city and culture that had just taken my life over. So I often say that writing about it—first a memoir, and now these novels—is my way of possessing my own experience, of engaging with everything that is amazing or fascinating or even frustrating and challenging about my own love affair with Paris and France.

Q. Your books also have mouth-watering descriptions of chocolate and pastries in France. What kind of research do you do to make these accurate? I am probably the most fortunate researcher in the entire world. To research these scenes, I’ve been blessed by the greatest gods of chocolate and pastry in the field, who have welcomed me into their laboratoires and kitchens so that I can observe: Jacques Genin and Michel Chaudun, as chocolatiers, and Laurent Jeannin as the head pastry chef at the Michelin three-star Épicure in the Bristol. I’ve also been privileged to have two excellent local-to-Duke chocolatiers, Paris-trained Bonnie Lau of Miel Bon Bons in Durham, and one of the earliest microbatch bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the US, Hallott Parsons at L’Escazu in Raleigh, who have allowed me to badger them with questions and curiosity when I’m not in Paris.

      It has been absolutely amazing and, of course, incredibly delicious, to be able to research with these incredible, passionate, perfectionist, generous, impossibly hard-working men and women. I am myself only an amateur cook, so I know I may still make some mistakes, despite all the research. But if I can at least capture the energy and sheer glory of what they do and what kind of people they are, that will be something.

Q     If you could only write about chocolate or Paris, not both, which would you choose? I don’t think I could do that! Choose, I mean. Paris but also the sensuality of things (chocolate, definitely!) are truly right at the core of so much of my creativity. That said, I am writing about neither chocolate nor Paris in my next series, but rather Provence and perfume and roses, so maybe that’s some kind of answer. Whatever is sensual and vivid and rich with culture appeals to me as subject and setting.

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Q.    This book has some sexy love scenes. I won’t ask about research, but how do you decide how much to include? Do you ever worry about your relatives reading the sex scenes?

You know, I just go with the story. These are fundamentally books about the full sensuality of life, of Paris, of food, of everything, and to pull back on that sensuality just when we’re reaching its very heart seemed wrong. I did have some reserve at first—having started with a memoir, to find myself shifting into such deeply romantic and sexy stories was a little disorienting for me. When I was first writing The Chocolate Thief, the first in the series, I kept thinking I should close the door or do something that would make this story more “literary”. But I finally realized that to make a story less powerful to fit some pre-conceived notion of what I could or couldn’t write was inane and, honestly, intellectually weak. So I just let it go. (Kind of like a certain song my daughter has been singing at the top of her lungs in the back of the car through all our travels through Provence the past few weeks.) And I think that once I released the full story and quit trying to chain it in any way was when I really hit my stride with writing, when I could embrace everything that fascinates me most about life—falling in love with a person, a place, an experience, living and loving with energy and passion through all kinds of challenges but always to the fullest.

Q.    What inspired your series of books about women falling love in Paris? You know, while I couldn’t myself put my thumb directly on the inspiration, I think if we look at my own life (falling in love in Paris), it’s probably pretty obvious to an outside observer. J  Internally, I’m not that conscious of my sources of inspiration, I just wake up with scenes in my head, but I can say that, through my own experience, I definitely believe in the power of love and also in the challenge and depth to falling in love across cultures.

Q.    How much of yourself do you include in your characters?

I wouldn’t be able to calculcate it. These characters aren’t me, not at all. But at the same time, they are entirely me. Writing is such an act of empathy, but empathy itself depends on us being able to imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes. (What would it be like to be…world-famous, for example, constantly in the public eye and judged? How would a shy person handle that? How would a stubborn, arrogant person handle that? What would it be like to grow up between two cultures? Etc.) So I may not be as famous as a certain character, but from somewhere in me I must be able to pull out the experience of being exposed or judged, or feeling shy or awkward, or whatever, and build from there.

Q.    Please share your writing story. How did you begin and what helped you succeed?

When I was in the third grade, we had a short story to write in class. I and my best friend, rivals for teacher’s pet, kept calling each other all evening. “I’ve got four pages!” I would brag. And she would say, “I’ve got five.”

The next day, I was so smug—nine whole pages! I would definitely win.

And she had twelve.

You might say, I’ve been determined to write more ever since.

But as to what helped me succeed—just sheer, stubborn persistence. I would read those writing magazines back then, all of which would say things like “always have ten submissions out” and “submit everything you write at least ten times”, and I would keep a little notebook, full of all my submissions, that I started making to magazines like The New Yorker when I was twelve. Filled with rejection letters, obviously. My father once told me, when I was an adult, that it used to break his heart to go get the mail every day. But I kept at it.

Q.    Do you have a new project you’re working on that we can look forward to?

Yes, the Vie en Roses series! I’m having a wonderful time with this one. It’s set in the region around Grasse in the south of France, in the heart of an old perfume family with their valley full of roses and jasmine. The first full-length book about the Rosier family is ONCE UPON A ROSE, out in August, but people can get a taste of that world in THE CHOCOLATE ROSE, which is connected to both series—a top pastry chef, but he’s long since left Paris to return to his roots in Provence and set up his three-star restaurant there. I loved writing that book and evoking this world of sun and old stone and all these scents. I hope you will enjoy it, too!

And thank you so much for having me on! I so appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and your readers about these books. (And if anyone would like more glimpses into the research, check out my website at www.lauraflorand.com. I also post lots of photos from the research on Pinterest!)

Enter the Giveaway if you are a reader in the U.S.

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An Interview on a French Blog

Today, my blogging friend Linda Mathieu has posted an interview with me. Linda lives in Paris with her French husband and travels to all kinds of exciting places.
Here's the link to her blog Frenchless in France
She had some really interesting questions, and I love that she thought this novel was better than the one before. That is the goal as an author to improve. How do I know she thought it was better? She gave me a five-star review on Amazon. The last book only got four stars.
Rather than including another copy of the novel cover, I've posted a picture of the cover that I didn't use. I don't want to get overexposed.
Hope you'll visit Linda's blog and leave a comment so I don't feel like I'm all alone in the blogging world.

Interview with Jennifer Cody Epstein

Visiting today is author Jennifer Cody Epstein, who wrote The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, a truly lovely novel. You can see my review of her novel here. Hope you enjoy her insights.

Here's a picture of the author that I stole from her website.
Hope she doesn't mind.

Q. How would you sum up The Gods of Heavenly Punishment for those who haven’t read it yet?

 Tough to do in a few words, as I've been learning! But essentially, it's an exploration of a key (but often overlooked) moment of the Pacific War: the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed 100,000 civilians in a few hours. I approach the subject from both sides of the conflict as well as from both the years leading up to it and those in its wake. It's also a meditation on war in general--what we lose, but also what we gain in the aftermath of enormous tragedy. 

Q. What idea or event inspired you to write your novel? 

 I've always been fascinated by Japan, and by America's evolving relationship with it. I lived there for five years, and while I'd heard much from my grandmother about how hated and feared the Japanese were during the war (like most in her generation she was pretty thoroughly propagandized, I think, and was alternately fascinated and slightly shocked by my decision to study there as a student) I could never comprehend how our two nations had descended to such levels of deep, mutual hatred--and then emerged from the war's wake as such strong allies. Then my husband came across a mention of the firebombing in an interview he was conducting (he's a filmmaker and has been making a documentary about a war crime in Iraq), and he came back and asked me what I knew about it...which, I realized abruptly, was pretty much nothing. So I looked it up online--and was flabbergasted that an event of such enormous human cost and complex ethics seems to have been left out of the story of World War II for most of us. I wanted to fill in that gap for myself--and (hopefully) for readers. 

Q. As an author, how much research is required for a book like this? Do you research from home or does it include travel?

I researched a lot--which for me isn't as onerous as it might sound because I actually find researching much easier than writing (!) Most of it was through books (both fiction and nonfiction) written reports, online documents and images etc--but I also travelled back to Japan in  2009 and interviewed three extraordinary women who had lived through the firebombing and very much wanted their stories about it to be passed along to the next generation. 

Q. Which character do you relate most to in The Gods of Heavenly Punishment? Do you share traits with any of the characters?

 I think I'm a combination between Yoshi and her mother Hana. I share Yoshi's fascination with language and her sort of introverted, meditative view of the world--but also I relate to her mother's fear of rejection and her perpetual sense of not fitting in--as well as her alternating tendencies to both embrace her (perceived) eccentricities and suffer because of them.  

Q. Please share your writing story. How did you begin and what helped you succeed?

 I've always loved to write, and I've always loved books. When I was very small one of my favorite pastimes was to staple together sheaths of paper to make "noves" that I'd then fill with pictures and stories, and as I got older I was almost always deep into a real novel no matter what I was supposed to be doing (I used to hide them on my lap when I was theoretically doing my homework, and prop them on the piano when I was supposed to be practicing!). I think in part it's that passion that helped me finally become a "real" writer--it was pretty much all I ever really wanted to do. That said, I also think that community was essential for my development as a writer. Working on my own, I started dozens of projects but really only ever finished a few short stories between the ages of 18 and 28. It was only when I went to graduate school, and found myself surrounded by fellow writers who would not only motivate me to keep going but would challenge me to do it better that I wrote anything worth finishing--not to mention worth publishing! That experience taught me how crucial feedback and support is to the writing process--and as a result, I've continued to work with writing groups since graduating. 

Q. What authors or books influenced you? 

 So many! But I'd say for this book in particular Sarah Waters' The Night Watch and Ian McEwan's Atonement were particularly important--both for the way they handled war's devastation and the skill with which they intertwine very different perspectives into a single narrative. 

Q. Are you working on a new project now that we can look forward to?

 I have started several and am only now deciding which one to go ahead on--but I think it will be another look at World War II, this time from the European angle. But it will also be an exploration of female friendship--how it shapes us, and also how it can both fail and redeem us. I'll keep you posted! 

Hmm, I wonder if Jennifer has read my novel with its take on a moment in World War II. Maybe, like me, she realizes how quickly people who remember those wars are fading from our lives.

Thanks to Jennifer for your interview and for sharing  your novel. 

France Book Tours -- Interview with Author M.J. Rose

Today, as part of France Book Tours, I’m welcoming M.J. Rose, author of Seduction.

Yesterday I posted a review of the novel and you can find it here. 

So, here we go:

Q. How would you sum up Seduction for those who haven’t read it yet?

I could but I love how this bookseller tells it.

"Seduction transcends time, recounting the story of Victor Hugo's tragic loss of his daughter and his desperate attempts to contact her via séances. Fast forward to the present, when Jacinthe 'Jac' L'Etoile, a mythologist specializing in Celtic lore, probes the secrets of the Isle of Jersey, where Hugo communed with spirits and composed his journal. With alacrity, Rose interweaves mythology, the supernatural, psychoanalysis and Evil Incarnate, creating an amazing amalgam of narrative wonder. And, yes, M.J. Rose fans, there are reincarnationists in Seduction, and they will haunt you." —Mystery Lovers Bookshop

 Q. You’ve published more than a dozen novels, yet Seduction is so original. What inspired you to include Victor Hugo and reincarnation themes in this novel?

When I write a novel I always need a question I want to answer. It’s not what the book is about… the reader might not even notice… but it keeps me motivated. The question that started this novel was way back in the early 2000s when I read Les Miserables. I was so curious about Fantine. She was such a tragic and heartfelt character. Who was she? Why did she have such a great impact on Hugo? Being a writer I knew it probably wasn’t as obvious as one might guess.

 Q. As an author, how much research is required for a book like this? Do you research from home or does it include travel?

This book took over two years of research and I usually have to do some traveling yet. It’s hard to go back in time and see the cities and towns the way they were – I wish I could though.

 Q. Is there a character in Seduction that you most closely relate too? Why?

I relate most to Fantine actually – I don’t know why but I felt her pain in a very visceral way. She moved me so much.

 Q. Do you believe in reincarnation? Did your beliefs make it harder or easier to write about reincarnation?

I’m open to it all – it’s all so fascinating to me.  I think I pretty much believe whichever character I’m writing in that moment. If pressed the best I can do is say - I don’t “not” believe.

Q. What inspired the title for Seduction?

I saw the book as a series of different seductions from the very beginning – most fascinating to me – the seduction of Victor Hugo by the spirit who offers him a “deal.” How a brilliant, powerful, rational man could be seduced into doing something terrible for the right promise.

Q. Please share your writing story. How did you begin and what helped you succeed?

Getting published has been an adventure for me. I self-published Lip Service late in 1998 after several traditional publishers turned it down. Editors had loved it, but didn't know how to position it or market it since it didn't fit into any one genre.

Frustrated, but curious and convinced that there was a readership for her work, I set up a web site where readers could download my book for $9.95 and began to seriously market the novel on the Internet. I was in advertising and just wanted to find the right marketing strategy so that my agent could go back to the publishers with my plan.

After selling over 2500 copies (in both electronic and trade paper format) Lip Service became the first e-book and the first self-published novel chosen by the LiteraryGuild/Doubleday Book Club as well as being the first e-book to go on to be published by a mainstream New York publishing house.

 Q. What authors or books influenced you?

So many – but I’d start with The Secret Garden when I was a little girl.. everything from Rebecca to Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights to The Great Gatsby. I am an obsessive reader.

Q. Are you working on a new project now that we can look forward to?

Yes – its about Catherine De Medici’s perfumer. 

Thanks to M.J. Rose for the interview. Below you'll find a synopsis of the novel Seduction. 

Please leave a comment with information about how to contact you and you could win a signed manuscript page from M.J. Rose and the chance to win the necklace featured on the book cover. 

Seduction Synopsis A gothic tale about Victor Hugo's long-buried secrets and the lengths we go to for love...
In 1843, novelist Victor Hugo's beloved nineteen-year-old daughter drowned. Ten years later, still grieving, Hugo initiated hundreds of séances from his home on the Isle of Jersey in order to reestablish contact with her. In the process, he claimed to have communed with Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, Dante, Jesus—and even the Devil himself. Hugo's transcriptions of these conversations have all been published.

Or so it has been believed...

Recovering from a great loss, mythologist Jac L'Etoile thinks that throwing herself into work will distract her from her grief. In the hopes of uncovering a secret about the island's mysterious Celtic roots, she arrives on the Isle of Jersey and is greeted by ghostly Neolithic monuments, medieval castles, and hidden caves.

But the man who's invited her there, a troubled soul named Theo Gaspard, hopes she'll help him discover something quite different—transcripts of Hugo's lost conversations with someone he called the Shadow of the Sepulcher. Central to his heritage, these are the papers his grandfather died trying to find.

But what neither Jac or Theo anticipate is that the mystery surrounding Victor Hugo will threaten their sanity and put their very lives at stake.

Seduction is a historically evocative and atmospheric tale of suspense with a spellbinding ghost story at its heart, written by one of America's most gifted and imaginative novelists. Awakening a mystery that spans centuries, this multi-layered gothic brings a time, a place, and a cast of desperate characters brilliantly to life.
Hardcover, 384 pages
Expected publication: May 7th 2013 by Atria Books
ISBN1451621507 (ISBN13: 9781451621501)

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