The French War Bride
This novel is told with dual narrators: two women who loved the same man. Kat was the darling of the country club set, a doctor’s daughter in a small Louisiana town. Engaged to her high school sweetheart, dashing Jack O’Connor, all she had to do was wait for him to come home from the war. But in a stunning turn of events, Amélie, a young Frenchwoman who has lost everything, becomes his bride overseas and returns with him to Louisiana.
The story begins as Kat and Amélie meet in their old age and Kat confronts Amélie, demanding to know the true story. Amelie recounts for Kat the dramatic Nazi occupation of Paris, and the horrors of the war for the people of France. As her story unfolds the reader begins to understand her part in the French Resistance and Jack’s inevitable decision to bring Amélie to America as his wife.
While Kat still feels anger and jealously toward Amélie, she starts to see how the war forever changed peoples’ lives, including her own. A tightly woven plot incorporating riveting facets of the Nazi occupation makes this character-driven novel a delight to read, and sheds light on both the devastation of France during WWII and the cruelties that war gives birth to.
