Michelle GableReseñas
Autor de A Paris Apartment
Reseñas
I loved Margo. She truly came into her own as this story moves along. She knew nothing about working or about photography. But she has an eye and Slim Aarons, photographer extraordinaire, capitalizes on it on more than one occasion.
I had no idea about several of these famous characters in this novel. Lilly Pulitzer is definitely famous down here in the south. She was one of the most intriguing figures in this story. Her intelligence and charisma comes through the pages and puts everyone to shame!
Need a good tale about some famous people…THIS IS IT! Grab your copy today.
I received this novel from the publisher for a honest review.
Now, 45 years later, Niki is invited to a banquet honoring the women who worked for the OSS and assisted the war effort. She takes her daughter as her guest, and her daughter learns secrets her mother has kept for years.
Interesting story, but slow at times.
[Keep reading @ Bookshelves & Teacups]
The novel opens in May 1989 as Niki and her daughter Andrea are attending a black tie dinner in Washington DC to honor the "Ladies of the O.S.S.", or as Niki says a "deceptively quaint title, like a neighborhood bridge club." Andrea knew that her mother worked for the O.S.S., the precursor of today's C.I.A., but she was shocked to learn that her mother was not an interpreter or secretary, but she was an important member of the propaganda team called Morale Ops.
The story turns to 1943, when Niki, who speaks eight languages, manages to get herself assigned to a Morale Ops team in Algiers. A few years earlier, Niki tried unsuccessfully to convince her parents and beloved young brother Pasha to leave Czechoslovakia with her as the Nazis were moving to annex the country.
Niki's team is soon sent to Rome during the last few years of the war and Niki hopes that she can get assigned closer to her home country where she can find out what has happened to her family. In the meantime, Niki uses her brains and creativity to find ways that Morale Ops can convince German soldiers and citizens that Hitler is losing the war and they should turn against him.
I liked Niki's creativity and her out-of-the-box thinking, even if it skirts military rules. Sometimes her ideas backfire, and when they do, she gets the blame. When her ideas succeed, her partner Will get the credit and promotions that she deserves.
Niki is brilliant, headstrong, and a terrible driver. She encourages a local Italian housewife-turned-prostitute Paloma to help her with some of her plans, and when her sister-in-law Moggy turns up (possibly to spy on Niki for Nicki's husband), Moggy becomes involved in as well.
Niki is based on the real life of Barbara Lauwers, and some of the operations in the story (code names Sauerkraut, Cornflakes, and Monte Rosa) actually happened. Gable brings her characters to vivid life, especially the women, and she gives Niki a great sense of humor. (Niki calls the O.S.S. "a hodgepodge of army castoffs and every rich family's one stupid son.")
I didn't know much about Rome after the Nazis were driven from there, and found Gable's description of it and the Morale Ops fascinating. If you are a reader of Susan Elia MacNeal's wonderful Maggie Hope WWII series, as I am, The Lipstick Bureau is a must-read.
Thanks to Harlequin for putting me on Michelle Gable's tour.
Niki isn’t a particularly likable person. She is a shoot-from-the-hip type of person and acts without thinking of the consequences, especially to those around her. But I did like her creativity and her passion. Despite minimal resources, her team of artists and forgers was successful.
It is obvious that Gable did much research for this novel. I enjoyed reading about the propaganda tactics used in WWII. These tactics proved to be successful in helping bring an end to the war. Niki, being multilingual, creates fake stories and distributes propaganda to lower the morale of enemy soldiers.
While the story is set mostly in Italy, Niki is trying to locate her brother fighting in Czechoslovakia. There is little written about what was going on in Czechoslovakia during the war, so I found the references to it very interesting.
I enjoyed the chapters written from Paloma’s viewpoint. Paloma, a prostitute, befriends Niki. It is from Paloma that we learn what WWII life is like for the people of Italy.
The book is also a love story, a story of friendship, and a story of survival. The ending was predictable, but I enjoyed the journey the book took me on. It had its exciting moments that had me on the edge of my seat.
I recommend this book to historical fiction fans.
Nikola left her home to marry an American in 1941. Her goal was to find out what happened to the family that she left behind and she believed that if she became part of OSS, she would have a good chance to getting to Czechoslovak to find her parents and her brother. She's assigned to the Morale Operations department in Rome to help create negative information to reduce the morale of the German soldiers. The department is filled with a strange cast of characters and no one is really overlooking their plans. Nikola was a person who would sooner do something now and if it comes to light, then to ask forgiveness. When there were no airplanes available to drop the negative information behind enemy lines, she came up with a plan to use German pow's to carry the information to areas where the troops would see them. She was reckless enough not to care that using pow's was not allowed via the Geneva convention. In some cases, her plans caused great danger to the people who were disseminating the information.
I found the background of the story very new and informative to me. The story was told by Nikola in 1989 as she told the story of her life during WWII. I never really connected to Nikola - I thought that she was too invested in breaking the roles so that her ideas could be used. She was treated poorly by the higher ranked officers because she was a woman.
Overall, I enjoyed this book because I learned things that I had never read before about the negative propaganda. I didn't really like the Nikola of the 1940s and she was much more likable in the part of her story in 1989.
Be sure to read the author's notes at the end of the book to find out additional information about the OSS and the real people that the fictional characters were based on.
I enjoyed reading about Niki and her cohorts in the Morale Operations branch. I've read relatively few stories from this vantage and found the tactics very interesting. The love story was fairly predictable and a bit of a yawn. I also found the modern day story completely unnecessary. Overall, 4 out of 5 stars.
This story started strong but it is very fragmented. There are lots of characters with a viewpoint and it is hard to tell who is doing the actual narrating in places. I did enjoy the aspect that it is based on facts. This did have me researching. And I love a story which has me learning. But, it is just too disjointed to keep me as captivated as I like to be.
Need a good story based on facts in WWII…THIS IS IT! Grab your copy today.
I received this novel from the publisher for a honest review.
I am a fan of historical fiction but I'm not sure that this classifies as such. The character of Alicia was interesting and her history was the most exciting part of this book. It may be that I don't find the Kennedy family as enthralling as others do but their family life, as described in this book, sounds dramatic at best. It would be interesting to see if it were an accurate depiction of not. While I hope others enjoy the book, this is not one I could fathom reading again.
Katie's sections are fairly bland; she's stuck in a writer's block and meets Simon, a head-school teacher, after breaking up with her long-term fiance. Her sections were a reflection of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, though not nearly as interesting.
I loved the parts that deal with Nancy and her family and friends which include the writer Evelyn Waugh among others. The Mitfords are a fascinating family: one sister married the Duke of Devonshire and another was supposedly Hitler's mistress. Another was jailed for Fascist leanings. Nancy was the oldest, brought up in a ramshackle estate though her father was titled. She ran with a witty circle of English elites and Ms. Gable does a very nice job with dialogue and the life they lived in wartorn London society. I give the book 3 1/2 stars based on the Mitford sections.
The novel attempts to tell a story of a passionate love affair between Alicia and Jack, but since she was Polish, they could not marry. Yet, after he was married, they did see each other again, and had a child, allegedly.
This book is over 500 pages long, but should have been edited down to 400 or less. The story was much more than a summer- it lasted for many years! I did find it interesting to read about this imagined story, but I have a hard time believing the heir would choose what she did as imagined in the book.
Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2021/08/the-booksellers-secret.html
Reviewed for NetGalley and a publisher's blog tour.
I've read other novels mentioning Nancy Mitford but was still not at all familiar with her life nor have I read any of her novels. As the life of Nancy Mitford is the major component of this historical fiction novel I feel that even though I looked up biographical information in the middle of reading this book it wasn't enough. I usually love any type of novel related to a bookstore and/or manuscript but I simply oscillate with this novel. At the very least perhaps I should have read about Nancy Mitford's life or read "The Pursuit of Love" before reading this novel.
For those not familiar with Nancy Mitford and family, I would suggest reading the "Author's Note," and "The Mitfords" as a welcome introduction. I had not looked over the "Table of Contents" at the start of reading the novel so the biographical information I read during a break from the novel was more comprehensive and became somewhat overwhelming.
For those interested in the author's research a "Selected List of Sources" is provided.
For Book Clubs a "Reader's Guide" and "Questions for Discussions" is provided.
There is no doubt that Michelle Gable completed an in-depth amount of research for this historical fiction novel and added her own accent of creativity. The dual timeline between the 1940's and present day was appealing and I might have abandoned the novel without it.
We begin the novel in the present day with a young woman named Katie struggling in her career as a novelist. She had one successful book, and now her engagement to her boyfriend of many years is over. When her best friend Jojo offers to pay Katie's airfare to come to London stay with her, her husband and four young children, Katie gratefully accepts.
Jojo tells Katie about a very special bookstore, G. Heywood Hill Ltd., where the owner is a book concierge for a mostly wealthy clientele. For a large sum of money Felix will compile a personal library, consisting of books unique to each customer's interests. (My dream job!)
Author Nancy Mitford worked at the G. Heywood Hill Ltd. bookstore during WWII. Nancy is one of six sisters, some of whom are notorious for being friends with Hitler, as well as being Fascists and Communists, and she was friends with famous writers of the day, like Evelyn Waugh, who hung out at the bookshop. (Picture "Friends" as a group of intellectuals on a WWII BBC show.)
Katie becomes intrigued by the rumor that Nancy Mitford had written a memoir, and that Felix was in possession of it, which he vehemently denies. Then she meets Simon, a school principal, who was also looking for Mitford's memoir for reasons of his own.
The characters in this novel are so interesting and well drawn. Nancy Mitford jumps off the page, with her clever quips and saucy attitude. It's impossible not to fall in love with her. Between her infamous family, her husband at war whom she hasn't heard from in three years, the French colonel who she falls in love with, her mission as a spy for Britain, and her struggles to write her next book, Nancy has a fascinating life. If you are a Nancy Mitford fan, you'll definitely want to read The Bookseller's Secret.
Other intriguing characters include Katie's grandmother, who is about to be kicked out her fantasy football league for her bad behavior, Jojo and her precocious son Clive, who is a real hoot. All three of these made me laugh. I also appreciated that the author wrote an informative real-life epilogue for several of the characters we meet.
The question that lingers is "did Nancy Mitford write a memoir and if she did, where is it?" You'll have to read The Bookseller's Secret to find out. I highly recommend that you do.
Thanks t
Raised in the Cotswold by uninterested, titled upper class parents, the children, six girls and one boy, were sheltered from the outside world and their existence in hindsight appears insular almost inbred. Hats off for the exploration and analysis done but this book only extended my disaffection for the Mitford Clan.
The dual timeline employed served its purpose but the characters in the “here and now” were vapid, uninteresting and who cares?! The dialog from the time of Nancy Mitford could have been lifted entirely from an early black and white movie, staccato, fast moving, spoken abbreviations with the unstated understanding that you would just get every spoken word and connect the dots.
I respect the effort, not so much the book. Thank you NetGalley and Harlequin / Grayson House for a copy
Set in London in 1942, aristocrat Nancy Mitford needs to earn a living for the first time in her life because her father has again made cuts to her monthly allowance. And she has separated from her husband. Adding insult to injury, she has writer’s block partly because her last book bombed and partly because she can’t come up with a storyline. She also has to deal with her controversial five sisters. She may have been persuaded to write a story about her life, but if she did, it was never published, and no such manuscript has been found and yet the rumors persist that it is hidden within the walls of the bookstore where she worked.
This was a hard book to read because the author didn’t give the reader any time to get to know her characters, including her main character, by their real names before switching to use nicknames and then return to their real names. Because of this, the reader is taken out of the story to try to figure out who the character is and what the relationship with Nancy might have been. If you can get beyond this, or maybe take the time to write down the characters’ names and nicknames and the relationship to the main character, you will quite enjoy this novel.
The reader will get a real sense of WWII London, the aristocracy, and how the country was changing as they dealt with the daily hardships of being under attack nightly.
My thanks to Harper Collins and Edelweiss for an eARC.
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Inserting fictional Margo Hightower into the world of Palm Beach society during the 1960s, author Michelle Gable gives readers a glimpse of the jet set from the perspective of an “everywoman.” Margo considers herself a failed debutante after her boyfriend calls off their engagement, her family is involved in scandal, and she is left with almost no money and no moneymaking skills. Thanks to a friend who convinces photographer Slim Aarons to hire Margo as his assistant, the premise had me settled in to read a guilty pleasure. And I was not disappointed.
Slim is famous for his photos capturing high society, royalty, and Hollywood stars in their habitat. Against the backdrop of the photo shoots, Margo “becomes swept up in the city’s social circle – and into a friendship with heiress and rising fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer.” (taken from the book jacket).
In addition to the recounting of Lilly Pulitzer’s ascent to resort-wear fame and photographer Slim Aarons’ career as photographer to the rich and famous, Gable shows the life behind the façade of last century’s privileged class. Seen through Margo’s somewhat naïve eyes, the novel is a page-turner that offers many thought-provoking topics and would make a great book club read.