Book Review: The Paris Winter, by Imogen Robertson

I love me a good historical novel, and this was a good historical novel.  The Paris Winter, by Imogen Robertson, follows Maud, and English woman studying art in Paris, who takes a job as a companion for a sister and brother.  The story is set during the end of the Belle Époque, and does a particularly good job in differentiating between the wild optimism usually associated with the time period and the crippling poverty that was so pervasive and so often ignored.

One thing that many of the other reviewers mentioned was the pacing of the book, which was bizarre.  Essentially, the book is split into two parts, and each part is wildly different.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that the events that I assumed would be the climax of the novel actually happened at the halfway point, which was very unexpected.  Personally, though, I don’t think that this was a bad thing.  The huge shift in the middle of the book unanchored the story from its expected course, and it became very difficult to predict what would happen next (which is, I think, a good thing in a suspense/thriller-type novel).  The two parts also fit well with the gun-over-the-mantelpiece aspects of the plot, which is one of my favorite types of plots.  Many things that seemed like mere details in the first part become clearly relevant to the plot in the second.  This is particularly true with the Morel’s plan, and it was also often subtly done, which is only of my favorite types of my favorite types of plots.

 

I think the main weakness of the book was the main character, Maud.  The reader is given a fair bit of background information on her, and she is the point of view character, but I just never felt like I got to know her (although, I do like her better in the second part).  My favorite character, and one that was surprisingly fleshed-out for how little she was actually in the novel, was Charlotte.  I guess to put it another way, Maud felt like a character and Charlotte felt like a person.  The Morels were well done, particularly Sylvie in the second half.  Tanya and Yvette read like the author deliberately took stock characters and tried to give them actual life.  For the most part, this worked, although the rich-girls-have-problems-too line sometimes became a little hamfisted with Tanya.  Yvette goes from being a background character in the first part to a major player in the second, which I have not seen done much in a single book (although I’ve seen it often done in some of the better book series), and I found that inexplicably satisfying.  In fact, Yvette’s treatment was representative one of the best parts of this book - there were really no throwaway characters.  Everyone had their own past, motives, and thoughts, and no one existed simply to further the plot.

I would recommend this book for anyone interested in historical novels and anyone interested in reading a non-traditionally structured book.

***SPOILER AHEAD***

 I just had to mention this.  At one point in the novel, Maud wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Christian leaving his “sister’s” room, basically while pulling up his pants, and then they kiss.  And Maud thinks, “Oh, I wish I was that close to my family.”  And I was like, “Really, Maud?  Do you really wish that?  Really really?”  Even if she didn’t put two and two together (having been told previously that the Morels were actually married, not siblings), it takes some serious naiveté to not be even a little disturbed here.

Really?