Tuesday Intros - Love From Paris

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.
Alexandra Potter wrote Love From Paris about a young Brit who is stood up by her American

boyfriend on her birthday so she goes to stay with a friend in Paris.
Here's the opening:

OK, calm down, it's got to be here somewhere.Rushing around my bedroom, I grab hold of my make-up bag and start rifling through it. Which of course is completely futile. I mean, is it just me, or does anyone ever pu a lip gloss in their make-up bag? It's always stuffed in a coat pocket gathering fluff. Or lost in a random handbag. Or stuck down the back of the sofa, top off, smearing pink gloop everywhere...

This book is definitely chick lit, which I enjoy many times. I'm a little worried because the next step is the friend in Paris representing an apartment that has been  untouched for 60 years, which is what The Paris Apartment was about. This is obviously a different take on it.
Hope you're reading something fun.

Tuesday Intros -- The Chocolate Temptation

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.
Reading one of Laura Florand's chocolate books is a bit like eating a box of chocolates. It's probably not the best thing for me, but it feels so good at the time. And they're usually set in France, so that's a bonus. French chocolates.
 I'm starting The Chocolate Temptation by Laura Florand. Sarah is an American intern in a Paris pastry kitchen and she hates then loves Patrick, one of the chefs.

She hated him. Tossing around dessert elements as if they were juggling balls he had picked up to idle away the time and, first try, had dozens flying around his body in multiple figure eights. Patrick Chevalier. Sarah hated him with every minute painstaking movement with which she made sure a nut crumb lay exactly the way Chef Leroi wanted it on a fnancier. She hated him with every flex of tendons and muscles in her aching hands in the evening, all alone in her tiny Paris apartment at the approach to Montmartre, knowing someoe else was probably letting him work the tension out of his own hands any way he wanted.

Unfortunately, the last book I read by Florand spent too much time in the characters' heads. I hope this one gets me out of their heads and into Paris.

Tuesday Intros -- The Ingredients of Love

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the first paragraph of her current read. Anyone can join in. Go to Diane's website for the image and share the first paragraph of the current book you are reading.

I just picked this up today, although I don't know anything about it other than there's an Eiffel Tower on the front and it says it's an International Bestseller. The Ingredients of Love by Nicolas Barreau says it combines Cyrano de Bergerac with Chocolat and Amelie.

Here's the intro:

Last year in November a book saved my life. I know that sounds very unlikely now. Many of you may feel I'm exaggerating -- or even being melodramatic -- when I say so. .But that's exactly how it was.
It wasn't that someone had aimed at my heart and the bullet had miraculously been stopped by the pages of a thick, leatherbound edition of Baudeliare's poetry, as so often happens in the movies. I don't lead that exciting a life. 

According to the book jacket, Aurelie, a restauranteur in Paris, finds a novel in a small bookshop then reads it to discover that she and her restaurant are included in the book. She reads it in one night and wants to desperately meet the author, but he's reclusive and she can't get through to him until one day he writes her back.

I can't wait to dive in. I hope you're reading something interesting too.