An Excellent Read: Whispering in French by Sophia Nash

Review by Susan Roberts

"In a night sky salted with stars, the waxing moon unspooled its light over the jet's wing. Inside, disconnectedness settled over the passengers of the Air France night flight to Paris. And in those murky hours after the food carts lurched down the aisles, the die-hards began a third film, exhausted infants surrendered to sleep, and the travelers in business class retreated ever further into the luxury of elbow-room anonymity." p. 3

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

August 2017; William Morrow; 978-0062471789
ebook, print (384 pages); women's fiction

I absolutely love reading books about France and this book was excellent.

Kate is an interesting main character – even though she is a psychologist trying to help her patients with life problems, her personal life is a mess and she doesn’t see much hope for her future.

She is divorced, estranged from her teenage daughter, has a mom she doesn’t get along with and is on her way to France to encourage her grandfather to sell his huge crumbling family villa.

He is in poor health and deeply in debt and she thinks that the only way to help him is to sell the home that has been in their family for centuries. As soon as she fixes everything in France, she can go back to America.

Life has a way of changing even the best of plans and the small-town village people and her memories of the wonderful summers that she spent at the villa make her re-think her plans. Will she be able to forgive herself and learn to live life to the fullest in France or will her self-doubts make her return to her unhappy life in America?

Take a trip to rural France in Whispering in French and find out how Kate decides to live the rest of her life.

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About the Book:

Home is the last place Kate expected to find herself…

As a child, Kate Hamilton was packed off each summer to her grandfather’s ivy-covered villa in southern France. That ancestral home, named Marthe Marie, is now crumbling, and it falls to Kate—regarded as the most responsible and practical member of her family—to return to the rugged, beautiful seaside region to confront her grandfather’s debts and convince him to sell.

Kate makes her living as a psychologist and life coach, but her own life is in as much disarray as Marthe Marie. Her marriage has ended, and she’s convinced that she has failed her teenaged daughter, Lily, in unforgiveable ways. While delving into colorful family history and the consequences of her own choices, Kate reluctantly agrees to provide coaching to Major Edward Soames, a British military officer suffering with post-traumatic stress. Breaking through his shell, and dealing with idiosyncratic locals intent on viewing her as an Americanized outsider, will give Kate new insight into who—and where—she wants to be. The answers will prove as surprising as the secrets that reside in the centuries-old villa.

Witty and sophisticated, rich in history and culture, Sophia Nash’s novel vividly evokes both its idyllic French setting and the universal themes of self-forgiveness and rebuilding in a story as touching as it is wise.

About the Author:

Sophia Nash’s novels have won almost two dozen national awards including the prestigious RITA Award and two spots on the American Library Association's “Top Ten Romances of the Year.” Sophia was born in Switzerland, raised in France and the United States, but says her heart resides in Regency England. Her ancestor, an infamous French admiral who traded epic cannon fire with the British Royal Navy, is surely turning in his grave. Before pursuing her long held dream of writing Historicals, Sophia was an award winning television producer for CBS, a congressional speechwriter, and a nonprofit CEO.

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Also available at HarperCollins and Barnes & Noble

Susan Roberts lives in North Carolina when she isn't traveling.  She and her husband enjoy traveling, gardening and spending time with their family and friends.  She reads almost anything (and the piles of books in her house prove that) but her favorite genres are Southern fiction, women's fiction and thrillers. Susan is a top 1% Goodreads Reviewer. You can connect with her on Facebook.

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Teaser: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

by Donna Huber

I think this year I'm going to try to read (or listen to) books that I never have but maybe should have. I have a list of books that I was suppose to read but didn't get around to (I think we were assigned something like 50 books my senior year). The first book up wasn't one I was assigned to read, but there are often references to it in life. I've been thinking about it since reading Sylvain Reynard's Gabriel's Inferno trilogy. When I saw The Divine Comedy available in audio at my digital library I thought that I would give it a try.

Have you read it?

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I dound me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.
Yet to discourse of what there good befell,
All else will I relate discover'd there.
How first I enter'd it I scarce ca say,
Such sleepy dullness in that instant weigh'd
My senses down, when the true path I left,
But when a mountain's foot I reach'd, where clos'd
The valley, that had pierc'd my heart with dread,
I look'd aloft and saw his shoulders broad
Already vested with that planet's beam,
Who leads all wanderers safe through every way.

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Teaser Tuesday: A Whole New You by Brett Blumenthal

by Donna Huber

When we embark on making change, it may appear that we do so for many different reasons. We reinvent careers because we don't like the type of work  we do or the industry we've chosen. We reinvent our personality so we can appear more outgoing or sociable. We reinvent our health so we can prevent - or possibly even help eliminate - disease. But if you get to the very core of all of these personal reinventions, out desire to change comes down to one very simple yet important mission: to be happy. (pg. 8)

One of my resolutions this year is to get through the review copies under my coffee table. Some of them have been there since I started blogging, nearly 4 years. Yikes! Since I have been ill for more than a year and just now seeing a light at the end of tunnel so I thought A Whole New You might be an interesting read. I don't read too much self-help so we'll see how this one goes.

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Rook: Allie's War by @jcandrijeski

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Should Be Reading. Share a couple of sentences from your current read to wet the appetite of other readers.

In Jon's words, she was a freak magnet, and always had been. Mia Taylor, Allie's mother, once told Cass that Allie had been nearly abducted, or abducted for short periods of time, six times as a child.

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