Tuesday Intros -- But You Are in France, Madame

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.

Catherine Berry is a lover of France like me and her family  actually moved to France for a year. That's what her book But You Are in France, Madame is about. I have to admit that the title confuses me a little bit because I'm not sure where to put the emphasis, like were they lost and someone said, "But you are in France, Madame." Or did she want to do something the way the Australians do it and someone said, "But you are in France, Madame." There are just so many places to put the emphasis. Here's the intro from Chapter 1.

"Congratulations, you are Italian!"
"That's all I have to do to get my Italian passport? It's that easy?" my husband replied.
"No, now we do the paperwork!" Grinning widely, the embassy official rose from behind the counter to hug and kiss my husband, resulting in a spectacular near miss of cultural proportions.
And so began the paperwork, lots of it...and the spiral of confusion (ours), smiling affability at our confusion (theirs) and hours waiting in the embassy queue, just to be told why the documents we had been instructed to find at the previous visit were no longer the right ones.
Time was running out for us. We had been talking about our year in France for years, family and friends were worn down with cheering us along from the sidelines of our hurdle-strewn marathon to the airport tarmac. My husband and I, both Australian-born, but of European descent, knew that if our family's French adventure were to be anything more than a three-month touristy jaunt, we would need extra documents. Either my husband had to get his Italian passport, or I had to have a British one approved. Both seemed an even better option; hence his misleadingly optimistic exchange above.  

 Thanks for visiting and I look forward to seeing what everyone else is reading.

Review of Finding Fontainebleau

As someone who loves France and all things French, I'm already sold on a book when it gives me a snapshot of French life.
And this book, Finding Fontainebleau by Thad Carhart, is unique because it is a memoir about a time when many Americans might not recognize France, that time in the early 50s, after World War II as France recovered from the war.
Carhart's family went to France, after his father was assigned to work as a military officer there. So the American family with five children rented a large manor house, and his father worked in an office in Chateau Fontainebleau.
Part of the book is the author's remembrances of growing up in France. Having worked on a memoir myself, I question how much a 4-year-old boy could actually remember, but I'm sure he spent time interviewing older family members, and some of the stories have probably become family lore.
I love the peek into French schools at the time, as he wrote about the students who poured black ink into each student's inkwell every day, and then the 5-year-old children had to meticulously copy out letters across the page. I can't even imagine.
Carhart also returned to France as an adult with his own children, so he jumps to different time periods. As an adult, he digs into the Chateau Fontainebleau, which played such a pivotal role in his childhood, and he is fortunate enough to be taken in by the architect in charge of renovating the chateau so he can gather backstage information about each section.
Those sections are then interwoven with French history about the construction and use of the chateau and the French culture at the time.
I enjoyed reading Finding Fontainebleau and felt like I gained many insights into French history, although the story didn't sweep me away or give me an urgency to finish. It was more like a leisurely boat ride as I enjoyed the sights.

Tuesday Intros -- French Illusions From Tours to 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.
Today I downloaded a new memoir on my Kindle. It's French Illusions: from Tours to Paris by Linda Kovic-Skow. This is the second part of Linda's memoir about her time in France, which began as an au pair. I read her first memoir two years ago and enjoyed it.
Here's the opening:

A chilly gust of December wind blew hair into my face as I leaned through the car window to swap cheek kisses with Evelyne. "Thanks for the ride," I said, pulling my blue wool coat tighter.
She smiled, and her toffee-brown eyes sparkled as she steered her Citroen down the cobbled street.

I'll be sure to write a review when I finish the memoir so you can all try it too.
I look forward to learning about some new reads from everyone else.

First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros -- Breathless An American Girl in 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.
My bookshelf is appalling bare, but I have so little time to read this month that it isn't likely to change, although I'm getting that itch to go to the library and carry an armload of books home.

I did still have this on my shelf and decided to at least start it. It's a memoir set in the 1960s, Breathless An American Girl in Paris by Nancy K. Miller. I feel like I've been that girl, just in a different era.
Here's the intro:

I didn't set out to sleep with Philippe. For one thing, he was my parents' friend; for another, he was married.

On one of their many trips to Paris before I lived there, my parents met Philippe Rousel, an ophthalmologist, at Aux Charpentiers, a neighborhood restaurant near Saint-Germain des Pres, where long, family-style tables bring you into closer contact with other diners than you might wish. In his travel diary, which I discovered after his death, my father reported that the French friends who had recommended the resyaurant had said that "while not modern or elegant it was a place where intellectuals came to eat."

I hope the book is closer to that first paragraph than the second.
 

Dreaming of France -- Take Me Away

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.

Today for Dreaming of France, I'm going to share a couple of things to help you connect to France.
One is a contest to win a week at an apartment in St. Remy de Provence.
I know, who wouldn't want to win a week's stay in Provence?
Just visit Vicki Archer's blog and enter to win.

The contest is through Oct. 8, so it's almost over.
Vicki is celebrating the fifth anniversary of her website and the completion of her rental renovation. I'd love to wander around Provence and return to this little jewel. And that is what she calls it, Le Petiti Bijou. Make sure you take the time to look at the pictures to see how she has decorated this quaint rental cottage.

Another freebie to take you to France, but only in books this time, is a free Kindle travel memoir on Amazon. I'm always trying new books about people moving to France. This one is called Tales from the Hilltop by Tony Lewis. It was free on Sunday, and I hope Monday too.
If you don't get it free, I'll read it and let you know if you should read it.
And, one more free book, at least it was on Sunday -- The Bleiberg Project. I can't tell if this book is set in France or not. It's a thriller and the blurb says it was an instant success in France. It is based on a conspiracy and the beginning of the blurb asks, "Are Hitler's atrocities really over?" The main character is a Wall Street trader who learns his family may be connected to the conspiracy.
Thanks for playing along today. I'm looking forward to going wherever your books or movies or photos take me too.

Dreaming of France -- Bonjour 40

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
Maybe we can all satisfy our yearnings for France, until we get there again.
This year, I lucked into a number of books set in France, both novels and memoirs. This week, I finished Bonjour 40: A Paris Travel Log by Karen A. Chase. Chase traveled to Paris to celebrate her 40th birthday and spent nearly 40 days in Paris with her boyfriend meeting her over there toward the end of her trip. She kept a travel blog and turned it into a book.
I'm not a short story reader, so maybe I'm not the typical reader for this book. I enjoyed some of the short posts, but I needed more meat to the story. I thought this book could instead make a great calendar with insights for every day.
Even though the book was short, 132 pages in paperback, it took me quite a while to finish it. Nothing dragged me back to it. I read it on my Kindle so I would turn to it in my spare moments.
Toward the end I found some really lovely writing as Chase described moments of light and love in Paris.

The first was while we were bicycling along the Seine near the Grand Palais, our tires crunching through the gravel. The mid-afternoon sun was dappling through the thick canvas of leaves overhead, falling randomly onto the dusty path ahead of us. Ted and I rode on opposite sides of a long row of chestnut trees, seeing each other in between the darkened trunks, like a movie-reel slowed so you could see every photo-perfect frame.

This memoir may interest you if you want some small bites of one person's trip to Paris.

Dreaming of France -- French Illusions memoir

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
Maybe we can all satisfy our yearnings for France, until we get there again.
I'm always on the lookout for fun books and especially books set in France.
Emma at Words and Peace blog alerted me to a new book about an American au pair in France.

Of course, since I've written 25,000 words of my own non-fiction account as a nanny in France, I had to read this one.
I'm only a couple of chapters into reading this memoir, which is called French Illusions. The author, Linda Kovic-Skow, tells the story from the late 1970s when she wanted to be a flight attendant and was turned down because she didn't speak another language. She determined to learn French by going to France as an au pair. Of course, she pretended she already spoke French to get the job as an au pair.
I'll let you know what I think when I finish.
I'm looking forward to your Dreaming of France posts today.

First Paragraph, Tuesday Teaser -- Traveling with Pomegranates

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.

This week I'm reading Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor. Sue Monk Kidd is the author of The Secret Life of Bees, but that's not what drew me to the book. The travel memoir is about Kidd who is on the cusp of 50 and having a hard time with who travels with her daughter, a recent college graduate, to Greece. I'm on the cusp of 50 and my daughter is turning 21 this year, so it seems like these women took the trip that we will not be able to afford this year. But my daughter and I would probably go to France instead of Greece.
Here's the introduction:

Sitting on a bench in the National Archaeological Museum in Greece, I watch my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Ann, angle her camera before a marble bas-relief of Demeter and Persephone unaware of the small ballet she's performing -- her slow, precise steps forward, the tilt of her head, the way she dips to one knee as she turns her torso, leaning into the sharp afternoon light. The scene remids me of something, a memory maybe, but I can't recall what. I only know she looks beautiful and impossibly grown, and for reasons not clear to me I'm possessed by an acute feeling of loss.

Also this week is Teaser Tuesdays. Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Open to a random page of your current read and share a teaser sentence from somewhere on that page. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers.
Here's mine from page 66:

"You are wearing pomegranates," he says abruptly. "You are mother and daughter? I pause halfway out the door. "Yes," I tell him. "Mother and daughter."
"Demeter and Persephone. All right then." He motions us back inside and starts the car.
 

What do you think?