What a quaint book. With a simple plot and colorful characters, it was a nice and light weekend read. The story is about Anna, a chocolate taster at a factory in England, who loses two of her toes when a chocolate vat falls on top of her. While she's recovering, she shares a hospital room with Claire, her former French teacher who once again endeavors to teach her the language. Claire hooks Anna up with a past acquaintance--or more--of hers who owns a chocolate shop in Paris, and off Anna goes (once she recovers) on a new adventure.Anna's adventure in Paris working in the chocolate shop of Thierry Girard, which is nothing like the industrial chocolate operation she interacted with in England, is charming. She repeatedly crosses paths with Thierry's estranged son, Laurent, who is also in the chocolate business. She deals with her over-the-top coworkers and Thierry's nasty wife. And interspersed with this story is Claire's story, of going to France for a summer as an au pair when she was a teenager to have some freedom from her overbearing father and meeting Thierry herself. Claire's story also has a contemporary component, as she fights cancer and ponders returning to Paris one last time before she dies.
The story was quaint and will, of course, make you want to eat chocolates. However, it is very surface-level. The cover sports a Sophie Kinsella quote, and this is definitely similar to Kinsella books. Anna has a newly-deformed foot but, despite admitting that she knows nothing about actually making chocolate--machines did all of that at her previous workplace--she comes to the rescue of the chocolate shop and, while she's not a master, surpasses her two more experienced coworkers very quickly. She has a romance with Laurent that doesn't seem like it is insta-love, but then at the end it apparently was, even though it wasn't? Either way, it's still only based on a handful of encounters, only one of which has any real emotion tied to it. Claire and Thierry seem to have a sizzling romance, but nothing ultimately comes of it and, in the end, it's a bit disappointing. And of course, Claire's terminal illness means that this book isn't quite as fluffy as one would think from the cover of the book.
There are a handful of recipes included in the back of the book, mostly for different kinds of chocolate cake; I didn't try any of them, but they seemed fine at a quick glance.
Overall, Paris is lovely, the story is quaint, but it's very surface-level and lacks any sort of deep emotion or resonance. I liked it, but it was nothing extraordinary and won't have me rushing out to buy Colgan's other books.
3 stars out of 5.
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