Synopsis

Twenty-two-year-old Catrine arrives in Paris, the city she’s dreamed of since childhood, and it speaks back—but not in ways she expected. Drifting through the streets of 1981 Paris, the voices of French writers she once read in solitude whisper back, intimate and insistent. Rather than reassure her, they unsettle her, exposing cracks in the person she believed herself to be.

When a brief romance ends in abrupt eviction, Catrine is left broke and unmoored, suspended between a city that won’t release her and a past she refuses to reclaim. An unlikely friendship with a widowed Sorbonne professor leads to an impulsive road trip to Normandy and everything begins to unravel. What follows is not the Paris she expected, but something more unsettling—and more honest.

Is the City of Light rescuing her, haunting her, or revealing something she’s been too afraid to see?

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Praise

“[R]eflective, heartfelt, and filled with small but meaningful moments that linger long after the final page.” —Los Angeles Book Review

Excerpt

Part One

PARIS

March 1981

Chapter 1

When I was little, my father read me Ludwig Bemelmans’s picture book, Madeline, so many times that I knew every word by heart. I even came up with my own story beginning: “In an apartment in Paris at the end of the hall, lived a girl named Catrine who was curious and tall.” It was one of dozens of titles I kept on my bedroom bookshelf. Most had belonged to a grandmother I’d never met and many were in French.

I devoured story after story about French farm children who churned butter in Normandy and made cheese in Burgundy. I read about mademoiselles in embroidered aprons, lacy coifs, and noisy wooden sabots who lived in Brittany, and about irresistible Gigi in turn-of-the-century Paris. My favorite was about a little girl, Nanette, who got lost in a turreted chateau outside a Breton village. Each story made me feel more connected to my invisible Francophile grand-mère than my own mother, with whom I was usually at odds.

From the age of five I knew I would go to Paris when I grew up.

Just before I started high school, Dad took me to the coffee shop Mother said was too expensive and I ordered my first café au lait. Unable to deny me, he bought me my first caffeinated brew. He didn’t have to say, “Don’t tell Mother.”

When he set a steaming bowl of foam before me, I inhaled the rich, creamy scent and then took my first sip of heaven. Dad laughed at the mustache it left on my upper lip. Just then, a tremulous alto poured from the café’s speakers.

“Édith Piaf,” Dad said. “They called her the Little Sparrow, le piaf. As tiny as you are tall.”

I loved her voice. It made me want to cry. “She lived in Paris?”

“Of course.”

I added Miss Piaf to what I knew about Paris and wondered if my grandmother knew her.

With new flavors on my tongue and Piaf’s lyrics encircling us, I asked Dad, “What was my grandmother like?” I didn’t often ask him about his parents because I could tell it made him blue, but I knew there was more to the story than that he had lost them too soon.

He sighed and looked out the café window. “Well, she loved studying French and spoke it well. She and I read La Fontaine’s fables together when I was a boy and then Maupassant’s stories when I was in high school. I tried to guess the endings because there was almost always a twist.”

I had organized my grandmother’s books alphabetically by author, from Bemelmans to Hugo and La Fontaine to Zola, and I’d read them all, even those whose French was difficult and caused me to miss some of the meaning. The world of French writers fueled the fantasies Mother called my wasted delusions.

“What else?” I ask.

“She was warm and sweet and smart. Tall and blonde with wide-set brown eyes. A lot like you. In fact, just like you.”

I saw his eyes mist over but I urged him on. “Her name was Catherine, right?”

Dad wiped his eyes. “Yes, Catherine. But everyone called her Cate and she didn’t like it. Wanted people to call her by her full name, pronounced the French way—Catrine. Like yours.”

I sipped my café au lait and imagined myself in Paris with Édith Piaf and Grand-Mère. Sometimes I pretended I was a princess in the French court or a protégé of Georges Sand, debating politics in cafés. I took myself to Paris, far away from Mother, almost every day, because I knew imagining was the first step to making dreams come true.

But it took me a long time to figure out who and what I was. It took pain, longing, rejection, and loss—a major loss that nearly crushed me—but most of all it took courage.

Coco Chanel once said, “Une fille doit être deux choses: qui et ce qu’elle veut.” A girl should always be two things: who and what she wants. I heard her sometimes, her voice faint, her accent intoxicating. She told me, Just do it, Catrine. Be who you want to be.

Finally, I listened.

About the Author

Marianne C. Bohr is a published author and award-winning essayist with a lifelong weakness for faraway places. A former travel blogger for The Huffington Post, she married her high school sweetheart-now her She wrote her first book, Gap Year Girl: A Baby Boomer Adventure Across 21 Countries, over the course of the yearlong sabbatical she and her husband took to explore Europe. It was published by She Writes Press in 2015. Kirkus Reviews said, “Bohr shines… providing glimpses of herself as a whole person, not simply a traveler. Gap Year Girl is an excellent choice…a travelogue filled with historic places, but its personal stories provide its highlights.” Marianne’s illustrated article on her gap year, The Year of Living Spontaneously, ran in Bethesda Magazine in 2013.

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