The Resistance Bakery

De: Siobhan Curham

Narrado por: Lauryn Allman

Paris, 1943. The scent of fresh baguettes hangs in the air as Coralie unbolts the door to her bakery with trembling fingers. She must get out of the city. Hiding her precious leather recipe book inside her coat, she promises never to let the secret locations of the people she worked tirelessly to save fall into German hands…

Present day. Raven is unhappy about being shipped off to the other side of the country for the summer to stay with the mysterious French grandmother she barely knows. And discovering a tattered, leather-bound book with yellowed pages full of handwritten recipes and coded numbers, she is stunned.

Her grandmother has never baked for her. And she refuses to talk about Paris, or the past. Flipping through the book, a faded photograph of a laughing couple falls out. As Raven scans the writing on the back she can scarcely believe her eyes…

What really happened in that tiny French bakery all those years ago? And could this forgotten recipe book finally bring healing to a woman still haunted by wartime secrets? Or has Raven’s discovery shattered any chance of bonding with her grandmother, before her time runs out?

The Resistance Bakery is an unforgettable story about forbidden love and family secrets in World War Two. Fans of The Letter, The Nightingale and Fiona Valpy will be totally hooked.

©2024 Siobhan Curham (P)2024 Bookouture, an imprint of Storyfire Ltd.

The characters felt so real especially Coralie.

I loved this book, it’s a little mystery, intrigue, love among comrades, humor, and romance. The chef”s description of the pastries and German food sent me on search for recipe’s.

Interesting characters

Liked how the story melded the characters together both during war time and many years later. Don’t usually like books that go back and forth in time, but this is done well. Make you care about the people and what they are doing. Different than other novels that I have read about that time period. Who knew a story about a baker and a chef would be so interesting!

One of the best!!!

I rarely write reviews. This is one that I had to share. The writing and storytelling was superb. I was hooked from the very beginning and couldn’t put it down. So many twists and turns. The performance by the narrator was perfection. She was able to bring each character alive with all of their different accents. It was also, refreshing to not have strong explicit vocab and unnecessary details about their physical intimacy. I appreciate books like this that are tastefully done. Again, this is a fantastic book that I highly recommend.

Heartwarming & Delicious!

Wow, I can’t wait to read her next book. What a wonderful and beautiful love story woven accurately with historical World War II data. Thank you for such a beautiful read. I enjoyed it so thoroughly. I was clapping at the end.

Bittersweet WWII Paris

I only gave 4 stars to my overall critique of this book because of the mostly jarring switching back and forth between 1984 and 1941-42--43.
I found the character of Raven to be obnoxious. She was justifiably furious with her mother for the violation of reading her diary, only to do the same thing to her grandmother. She approached her grandmother's story as if it was a thriller that could have been fiction for all she cared, then when caught--more than once--she lied. I found her to be not at all sympathetic.

Suzette was not a fully drawn character, and what little we see of her isn't sympathetic. Why did she tell her mother she wishes she'd died instead of her father? What happened between them to elicit such a hateful thing to say?

All in all, the story would have been served better either without the switches in time, or with a deepening of the relationships between mother and daughter over time.

The part of the story set in Paris during the war was good, especially the development of the relationship between Caroli and Reinhart.

The end was lovely and romantic, but also sad. Forty years lost to lies and misunderstandings.