Last Christmas in Paris: A Novel of World War I

psst...wanna hear a secret?...looking at other reviews, it's not going to be a popular response...I kinda hate Evie. As a posthumous narrator, she's the chipper-est (I'm making that a word for this review), full of sunshine and sparkly champagne, limp noodle of a character. Which also makes her the most boring, naive, dumber than a rock narrator to grace the books I read this year. Which was incredibly disappointing given how much I was looking forward to reading this book.

See, I adore epistolary fiction. It's fun. Chapters are short. You get multiple view points. In this one, Evie was supposed to be this great writer and yet all her letters felt simple and naive, even as the war drug on. And then there were her columns, which at best were contradictory. One moment she's bemoaning about not really knowing what the boys were in France fighting for in her letters to Tom (ya know, because the rich little girl can't get her way travel right then) and the next she's going on in her column about all the things they were fighting for and how the rest of the population should support them. At least I think they did - I admit to mostly skimming through the included columns after I realized that had no impact on the plot whatsoever. Mostly they were just another way for dear little Evie to make herself feel important (which ended up being a theme, whether intended or not). Throughout the whole thing Evie acted/wrote like war was some kind of grand adventure. Even when she joined the WAACs, she still acted like it was some great adventure. War is not.

I couldn't help but wish that Alice had been the central character in this book.

I didn't think I would like this book as much as I did. They say not to judge a book by its cover, but... we all do it anyway, don't we?

When my book club chose it for our December read, I thought Last Christmas in Paris was going to be mediocre and poorly researched, as most “historical romances” I have read have been. But instead it was extremely well written, researched, and edited. I didn't roll my eyes once at the romance, either, which amazed me. I laughed and teared up with the characters, and learned a lot about WWI along the way.

I would recommend this to anyone looking for a good book to read around the holidays that is not cheesy or meh. It was a pleasant surprise!