June - The Little Paris Bookshop

My but we had a tough time staying on topic with our discussion in June! Luckily, more than one of us would get us back on track. You'd think we only saw each other once a year, not once a month! But there always seems to be so much to catch up with. 

This book was not just our book about books but also our translated work; it was originally written in German, although Nina George now lives in France. We could definitely see both German and French influences in the book; a husband that's ok with his wife having a lover is definitely a French thing. 

One of the publisher's questions that we discussed was how a book can heal or help you through things. Mostly we agreed that they can be an escape or a way to lift your mood but we did have a couple of examples where people felt that books had really impacted their lives. Another question had to do with a quote from a book that essentially asks if this is the kind of book that you enjoy but then forget about. For the most part, people felt like this is a book they would remember, although Linda had previously read it and could only remember that the bookshop was a barge. 

There's a scene in the book that we all agreed really seemed out of place in the book, despite the way George used it to move the characters along (here we felt like it was the Germanic coming through). 

We talked about how deceptive the title of the book is - the bookshop is only in Paris a short part of the book and while books play a big part in the book, the shop itself is more important for being the home to Jean and Max than for being a store. But we also acknowledged that we'd probably not have picked up this book had it been the titled "The Lavender Room," which is the translation of the title George gave it. Still, we were glad that we'd read it because it had a lot of interesting characters and made for good discussion...when we could stay on track!