*I received a copy of this book in eBook format via NetGalley in return for this review. All reviews published on Yours, Chloe are completely honest and my own, and are in now way influenced by the gifting opportunity.
Caution - This review does contain spoilers.
Title: The Last Letter From Paris
Author: Kate Eastham
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating: ★★★★
The Last Letter From Paris tells the story of Cora Mayhew, a First
World War foundling who has been adopted by Evie (the nurse who found her) and
her husband. All Cora knows about her birth mother was that they shared the
same flame red hair, she was French and that she had left Cora with a distinctive
necklace. Now an adult, Cora makes the journey from America to France in search
of her mother but shortly after arriving the second world war breaks out and
she ends up trapped in Nazi occupied France.
One thing that Kate Eastham does do incredibly well in the book
is her exploration of the complexities of adoption and also female experiences
of miscarriage, stillbirth and infertility. Whilst a historical fiction novel
might not be the most obvious setting for exploration of these topics, it’s
done in a really clever and powerful way whilst maintaining the main focus of
the story. This is primarily explored through occasional chapters focusing on
Evie’s experiences stuck in America unable to have any contact with Cora whilst
she’s in France. I also really enjoyed the feature of strong female characters
connected by shared challenging experiences, through Iris, Evie and Francine
and the bond they built working as nurses on different ships. I didn’t realise this
until I was researching the book for the purpose of this review but Evie and
Iris are actually both characters from another of Kate Eastham’s books ‘The Sea
Nurses’ and I’m sure fans of this previous work will appreciate a return to the
characters and their stories after the first world war.
We get a fantastic exploration of Paris in the immediate aftermath
of the Nazi occupation and I think having our protagonist being an American
citizen added a really interesting aspect to the story. Cora is staying with
Iris, her mother’s best friend from their time as nurses, but when Iris is
arrested by the Nazis on the first day of their occupation, Cora refuses to leave
France for the safety of America until Iris is safe. Whilst awaiting news about
Iris, Cora gets involved with the French resistance and this leads to a series of
events which see her having to flee Paris whilst wanted by the Nazis.
One aspect of the book I struggled with is the lack of closure.
We have a beautiful sequence of scenes where Cora finds a newborn baby in a
bombed out house and takes on the care of the child, mirroring the scenes of
her adoptive mother Evie finding her as a newborn and taking her in. I really
enjoyed this plot point as I felt it added a new dimension to the story,
setting it apart from the typical ‘resistance member fleeing the Nazis’
storyline that has been done many times before in other historical fiction
works. But unfortunately, this aspect of the plot didn’t last very long as Cora
leaves the baby with a French woman, in the hope she can get in contact with
the baby’s father who is in a POW camp. Whilst I appreciate Cora’s reasoning
for doing this, I was disappointed that we’d so quickly lost such a unique
aspect to the story and I think that, although it would have taken the story in
a completely new direction, the concept of the child being adopted by Cora and
taken to England would have been really interesting. Instead, we’re left with
the knowledge that the baby is in France and never really hear about her again,
which was disappointing to me.
During her escape, Cora meets German soldier Max
Heller who offers to help her. Max has family in America and this helps him to
form a connection with Cora so he helps to shelter her and the baby she has
found and ultimately romance blossoms between them. Whilst I found the idea of
Cora, a resistance member and American citizen on the run from the Nazis,
falling for a German soldier to be really interesting, I did struggle with
aspects of their romance. Ultimately, they spend only a matter of days together
yet we’re meant to believe they’ve fallen madly in love, enough that (big
spoiler alert) Max would come and find Cora in America after he’s discharged
from the army. Their love felt incredibly superficial and I don’t think this
was helped by the fact that their time together was squashed into merely a couple
of pages, despite Max’s prominent feature in the blurb making us think he’s a
key character. This meant that we as readers weren’t granted sufficient time to
explore their blossoming relationship and in turn start to root for them. Again
this is another plot point which I think is a really interesting concept and could
have turned into an interesting book in its own right, but it just wasn’t given
the attention it deserved within this story.
I also struggled with the fact that the plot veered so far away
from the focus on her finding her birth mother. The opening chapters and blurb
of the story focus so significantly on the importance of finding Cora’s birth mother
but this is quickly forgotten as the rest of the story plays out. Whilst the
resistance work she did and her subsequent arrest by the truly evil Nazi
officer Karl Hesser was a really interesting plot point, it felt like a
completely different book entirely to the one we’d started about a foundling
trying to find her birth mother. The attention was so focused on Cora’s
experiences at the hands of Hesser that we don’t hear much about her mother
until a casual mention in the closing chapters in what felt like an afterthought
attempt to close the storyline. And this mention actually leaves us with more
questions rather than answering them. I wish that the story had actually been
split into two separate books: one focused on a foundling’s attempt to find her
mother and one focused on an American woman working for the French resistance in
Nazi occupied France.
The scenes where Cora has been imprisoned by Karl Hesser and
is both drugged and physically assaulted were gripping but slightly fantastical
as it seemed incredibly unlikely that the one officer who has a vengeance
against Cora would happen to show up in the location she had fled to. Cora’s
survival was ultimately completely down to the help of other people and this
was a shame as earlier points had hinted towards some strong character
development from the rather naïve young woman she was at the beginning of the
book. It would have been less of an underwhelming ending had Cora escaped the
hands of Hesser of her own accord.
Overall, The Last Letter From Paris is an easy-to-read novel which is well paced and definitely packed full of action, if you can by pass the fantastical elements and underwhelming lack of overall closure. I really wanted to love this book and felt it had such potential but it unfortunately missed the mark for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment