A Garden in Paris

A Garden In Paris

Stephanie Grace Whitson

I have to be honest. If I’d realized at the library that this book was marked as Christian fiction, I wouldn’t have taken it home, because I find most overtly Christian fiction to be smarmy and insincere and I dislike being preached at.

This is a case, though, where that would have meant missing a great novel, a fictional travelogue about a woman who returns to Paris, where she’d been a foreign exchange student as a young girl, after losing her husband, and rediscovers not only romance, but her pre-marital adventuresome self.

Yes, there’s relationship angst between the main character and her daughter, but there’s also music, and dashing French men, and cute cafes.

And yes, there is talk of god and religion, but it’s organic, and true to the characters, and didn’t strike me as being preachy or smarmy at all.

I’m not sure I’m willing to read the sequel, but I quite enjoyed this book.