My Life in France / Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme

The Julia Child portion of the film Julie & Julia was based on this book by Alex Prud’Homme (look below for the review of Julie Powell's book). It’s the story about how she followed her husband in the foreign service to France, where she discovered gastronomy and her raison d’etre. Her love of food and cooking was backed up by a meticulous and painstaking approach, every recipe she included in her groundbreaking cookbook was tested and retested, always with the American cook in mind, with American kitchens and provisions from American grocery stores. The book also chronicles her post-France years and her rise to fame as America’s original celebrity TV chef, but my interest somewhat flagged after the Childs left Marseille. The first part of the book was what was featured in the movie version as well. If you are a francophile or a gastronome, or are simply interested in reading about one of TV’s early and most colorful personalities, don’t hesitate to read My Life in France. (Note: the photos in the Nook version were a little hard to appreciate since they displayed in such a small format.)

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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