Publication Date: October 2012

230 pages, Oblique Presse,
available on Lulu.com ,
ISBN-10: 1300257334,
ISBN-13: 978-1300257332

 Available in ebook for $3.99
and paperback for $14 at Amazon.com
and in paperback for $14 at Lulu.com

Paulita Kincer’s website | My review

***

 Synopsis

When Fia Jennings loses her job at the local newspaper, she dreams of bonding with her teenage twins. As she realizes she may be too late to pull her family closer, her husband Grayson pressures her to find another job to pay the increasing bills. Relief comes with a phone call from Fia’s great Uncle Martin who runs a bed and breakfast in Provence. Uncle Martin wants Fia to venture to France to run the B&B so he and his wife Lucie can travel. He doesn’t tell Fia about the secret he hid in the house after fighting in World War II, and he doesn’t mention the people who are tapping his phone and following him, hoping to find the secret.

After much cajoling, Fia whisks her family to France and is stunned when Uncle Martin and Aunt Lucie leave the same day for a Greek cruise. She’s thrown into the minutiae of a running the B&B without the benefit of speaking the language. Her dreams of family bonding time fade as her teenagers make French friends. Fia’s husband Grayson begins touring the countryside with a sophisticated French woman, and Fia resists the distractions of Christophe, a fetching French man. Why the whirlwind of French welcome, Fia wonders after she comes home from a day at the beach in Nice to find someone has ransacked the B&B.

Fia analyzes Uncle Martin’s obscure phone calls, trying to figure out this WW II hero’s secret. Can she uncover the secret and relieve Uncle Martin’s guilt while building the family she’s always dreamed of?

(No violence. No graphic sex, some sexual situations.)

***

I enjoyed very much The Summer of France when I read it last year.

In my review, I mentioned:

• It starts on the quiet side as Fia hopes for a kind of new beginning thanks to the invitation of her uncle and aunt to go and run their B&B during the summer, so that they can take a break.
• But things are never what they look, are they? And so this gentle book grabs you and pulls you into all kinds of unexpected surprises and mysteries…
• It is a rich narrative, with characters you can easily imagine in real life…
• And all of this with Provence as the background…

These are only snippets of my review. I suggest you go read it all, to see why I was so enthusiastic about this novel

Today, for France Book Tours,  I would like to highlight a few passages where the author mentions countryside scenes in France, to have you enjoy a bit of some peaceful views in case you can’t spend you summer there this year!

Aunt Lucie stood on the flagstones by the front door of the house as Uncle Martin zoomed up the drive through the row of plane trees, those thick-trunked trees with pale, peeling bark. Their trunks looked like so many well-ordered school children standing in line, walking two by two, then their tops erupted into a riot of limbs and leaves.
“I can’t believe you have these trees,” I cried. I loved everything I had seen from the train station with its modern glass walls to the winding roads and the glimpses of villages built into cliffs. Then to see the gorgeous mountains in the distance and turn into a lane lined with plane trees. My fantasy life was nowhere near this rich”. p. 28 on Nook