A #HistoricalMondays #25PagePreview | feat. “The Paris Dressmaker” by INSPY Historical novelist Kristy Cambron

Acquired Book By: I am a regular tour hostess for blog tours via Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours whereupon I am thankful to have been able to host such a diverse breadth of stories, authors and wonderful guest features since I became a hostess! HFVBTs is one of the very first touring companies I started working with as a 1st Year Book Blogger – uniting my love and passion with Historical Fiction and the lovely sub-genres inside which I love devouring. Whether I am reading selections from Indie Authors & publishers to Major Trade and either from mainstream or INSPY markets – I am finding myself happily residing in the Historical past each year I am a blogger.

What I have been thankful for all these years since 2013 is the beautiful blessing of discovering new areas of Historical History to explore through realistically compelling Historical narratives which put me on the front-lines of where History and human interest stories interconnect. It has also allowed me to dive deeper into the historic past and root out new decades, centuries and millenniums to explore. For this and the stories themselves which are part of the memories I cherish most as a book blogger I am grateful to be a part of the #HFVBTBlogTours blogger team.

I received a complimentary ARC copy of “The Paris Dressmaker” direct from the publisher Thomas Nelson (an imprint of HarperCollins Christian Publishing) in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.

On why I love time shift narratives (ie. duel POVs) and war dramas:

I have a bit of a hankering about chasing after time shift narratives wherein you are seeing a strong representation of a duel POV from two leading characters who are living in different eras of time and yet, their co-joined journeys are imperative to the cohesiveness of how the story is told by the author. It is an interesting perspective to explore because you are enjoying diving in and out of one generation’s influence on the story and peering into another generation’s spin on the same set of circumstances as it co-relates to their world and life.

The kind of war dramas I read in the past vs the kind I read now are a bit uniquely different from one another as I am preferring to tap into the human interest war drama stories such as this one rather than the traditional war drama which can become a bit more intensively difficult for me to read nowadays. I am enjoying seeing more of a Historical Women’s Fiction side of the genre in other words than being constantly at the sidelines of the battlefields. Sometimes that lens is seen through the men, too – but I just wanted to highlight how this new interest relates to my current story in focus on Jorie Loves A Story today.

You might have noticed I had a change in date on the blog tour this month – my life truly shifted this February and as my parents and I worked through those transitions, I had to sort out how to resume both my readerly life and what I wanted to share on my blog. I moved this tour forward by a week but I underestimated how exhausted I would feel after the conclusion of the past week. Thereby I did struggle to get into the context of the story but still wanted to share a portion of my reactions with you today as I think I’ll have to table reading the rest of this story until I re-balance my hours as it is quite the serious read and with my mind and body a bit overly taxed lately re-adjusting through our adverse February, I admit, I wasn’t quite prepared to read this as I had before our lives had a personal emergency to shift through earlier in the month.

The Paris Dressmaker
by Kristy Cambron
Source: Publisher via Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours

Based on true accounts of how Parisiennes resisted the Nazi occupation in World War II —
from fashion houses to the city streets — comes a story of two courageous women who risked
everything to fight an evil they couldn’t abide.

Paris, 1939. Maison Chanel has closed, thrusting haute couture dressmaker Lila de Laurent out of the world of high fashion as Nazi soldiers invade the streets and the City of Lights slips into darkness. Lila’s life is now a series of rations, brutal restrictions, and carefully controlled propaganda while Paris is cut off from the rest of the world. Yet in hidden corners of the city, the faithful pledge to resist. Lila is drawn to La Resistance and is soon using her skills as a dressmaker to infiltrate the Nazi elite. She takes their measurements and designs masterpieces, all while collecting secrets in the glamorous Hôtel Ritz—the heart of the Nazis’ Parisian headquarters. But when dashing René Touliard suddenly reenters her world, Lila finds her heart tangled between determination to help save his Jewish family and bolstering the fight for liberation.

Paris, 1943. Sandrine Paquet’s job is to catalog the priceless works of art bound for the Führer’s Berlin, masterpieces stolen from prominent Jewish families. But behind closed doors, she secretly forages for information from the underground resistance. Beneath her compliant façade lies a woman bent on uncovering the fate of her missing husband . . . but at what cost? As Hitler’s regime crumbles, Sandrine is drawn in deeper when she uncrates an exquisite blush Chanel gown concealing a cryptic message that may reveal the fate of a dressmaker who vanished from within the fashion elite.

Told across the span of the Nazi occupation, The Paris Dressmaker highlights the brave women who used everything in their power to resist darkness and restore light to their world.

Genres: Feminist Historical Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Women's Fiction, Inspirational Fiction & Non-Fiction, INSPY Realistic Fiction, Time Slip and/or Time Shift, War Drama

Places to find the book:

Borrow from a Public Library

Add to LibraryThing

ISBN: 978-0785232162

Published by Thomas Nelson

on 16th February, 2021

Format: Paperback ARC

Published by: Thomas Nelson (@ThomasNelson)
an imprint of HarperCollins Christian Publishing (@HCChristianPub)

Converse via: #HistFic or #HistNov as well as #INSPY #HistoricalFiction
+ #TheParisDressmaker as well as #TNZFiction and #HFVBTBlogTours

Available Formats: Trade paperback, Audiobook and Ebook

| The Paris Dressmaker | by Kristy Cambron

Cambron doesn’t let you wait for the intensity of being in the Resistance to hit you – as the opening paragraph in her novel The Paris Dressmaker gives you a lovely taste of the emotional anxiety anyone in the movement would have felt on their missions. The ways in which they were being hunted and chased to the unknowns in regards to where they were individually at any given point in time in the country’s they were working. They had to rely on their wits and let their nerves fuell their adrenaline which Cambron expertly empathising in this opener of the story!

Lila is ballsy for a girl who seems to have had a rather charmed life before she joined the Resistance – and yet, there is sombering side to her story too. The kind which involves lost love and lost chances – her reunion with Rene is a testament of that and how serendipitous it was him she would find in the middle of nowhere right when she needed aide the most. Cambron talks you through the fears and the training Lila was given to survive – how she has to bottle her gravest concerns in order to focus on the mission at hand and how even pain itself isn’t warrant enough to give in to the impossible odds.

Lila has a natural bourne flavour of moxie which I think suited her well in her previous life and is an asset now in her new one – as she doesn’t mince words nor does she labour over details. She wants to keep herself safe at all costs and that means making haste when it comes to the choices she needs to make to ensure her safety and her protection from the forces who’d rather she were found and caught. Her issues with trust are valid as well – as Cambron points out a few times already in the opening chapters – how any person in the Resistance can be brought to the wrong side by a friend not just a foe and how trusting the wrong bystander could also prove deadly. It isn’t work for the faint of heart nor anyone without a resolve of steel!

By the time Sandrine entered the storyline – you were already enjoying this Historical Women’s Fiction narrative – as it centres on the women at the heart of the story and their lives during war. For Sandrine in particular she was weighing every action she took against the safety of herself, her son Henri and her mother-in-law knowing full well that any misstep might lead to their doom or a situation she would have to live with herself as it would only affect her own plight. It was a dance of odds just as her mother-in-law suggested – how you had to live through your hours moving straight ahead and not re-consider the choices as they were made against the person you once were and the person you were now. It was a hard look at the harder choices affecting certain women who were singled out – in this case, for Sandrine’s expertise in art which placed her at higher risk.

And, similar to Lila, with Sandrine – Cambron has a way of entombing lessons of life and faith into the fabric of how her characters take their entrance into the evolving storyline. Cambron finds subtle ways to reflect the faith of their lives against the tides of the war evolving behind them and the ways in which war is an influence of strife against them both.

On the historical storycrafting styling of Kristy Cambron:

I loved the atmospheric dimensions of detail Cambron etched into the background of her scenes – where you can feel Winter and not just observe it. You can understand the tension of her characters but you can also emotionally sense their anxieties. That coupled with how she paints the portrait of where we are entering their lives in-scene makes the opening pages of this novel quite enticing because you are seeing everything with the added bonus of Cambron’s depth of centre to place you in this world where one mistake could prove fatal.

The compassionate way in which Cambron showed Rene’s reaction to reuniting with Lila was priceless. He was truly struck offguard by her presence and yet, instead of making that moment harder for them both he instead took the higher road and just ‘got on with things’ in order to keep them both alive. There is a back-story here – percolating in the background of their conversation – a lost relationship, a disconnection and something more. I was truly curious to know more rather quickly than for it to trickle out in future chapters – there was such a strength of suspense in these two characters, how their lives first intersected – why they were separated and of course, how this would effect their reunion now. Cambron knows how to carry a thread forward in the reader’s mind and to linger there a bit to cause them to become even more curious about the after effects of what is revealled.

The way in which Cambron approached introducing us to Lila and Sandrine was to place us forward in the motion of the story – where their lives are ticking against the clock between 1943 and ’44. Shortly thereafter Cambron re-centres us on their lives – taking us back to ’39 to revisit with Lila. It is an interesting way to set the tone for their story – to put us front and centre in the future and then to backtrack to better understand their motivations and their reasons for what they did lateron in the forties as the long winding road of the war starts to greet its end. Not that they would have known that at the time but for those of us looking back on their lives – we know the truth of when the war ended. And, for those people who lived these lives – it pulls at your heart and soul knowing how hard they had to fight and why they chose to fight as hard as they had for the reasons we all understand now as we study History. This is one of the blessings of Historical Fiction and in particular Feminist driven Historical Fiction – to unearth the stories, to understand the lives of the women who lived those lives and to honour them by listening to their stories.

This blog tour is courtesy of:

Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours!

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Reading this story contributed to my 2021 reading challenges:

{SOURCES: Book cover for “The Paris Dressmaker”, book synopsis, author biography, author photograph of Kristy Cambron the tour host badge and HFVBTs badge were all provided by Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours and used with permission. Post dividers badge by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets were embedded due to codes provided by Twitter. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: 2021 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge banner, #HistoricalMondays banner, #25PagePreview banner and the Comment Box Banner.}

Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2021.

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Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• 2021 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge