The Lost Carousel of Provence
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
"An artist lost to history, a family abandoned to its secrets, and the woman whose search for meaning unearths it all. American photographer Cady Drake shoots local merry-go-rounds, a hobby inspired by a carved wooden rabbit gifted to her following her troubled years in foster care. Now at a crisis point in her life, Cady can't refuse a freelance assignment documenting the antique carousels of Paris. While there, she hopes to track down the true origins of her rabbit, which she has always believed to be carved by French carousel maker Gustave Bayol. Cady's research leads her to Provence, where she discovers a dilapidated carousel carved by Bayol for the grand Château Clement in the early 1900s. After commissioning the carousel, the Clement family struggled to maintain their ancestral home through the two World Wars, buffeted by jealousies passed down through the generations. Despite the carousel's derelict state, Cady longs to restore it--if she can secure the permission of the run-down château's gruff, elderly owner, a man with secrets of his own. As Cady digs deeper into the past, unearthing century-old photographs of the Clement carousel and its creators, she might be the one person who can bring the past to light and reunite a family torn apart"--
Reviews with the most likes.
Cady is off to photograph old carousels in France, and submit for a book that is being put together. But along the way, she is going to find more than just carousels, but maybe even find who she is in the process...
This was a great read, and I really enjoyed it!
I really enjoyed the interweaving narratives, which were more complex than the book blurb had led me to believe. I also loved the setting, of course! But even more than that, it was really sweet to see the way the characters came together. A lovely rainy afternoon read.
This was a perfectly charming book with a gorgeous setting and some interesting characters, but I found that the family “mystery” wasn't all that mysterious and that some of the characters were far more interesting than others.
I also found some of the things introduced early on were not really addressed realistically- namely the twin sources for the protagonist's grief were kind of abandoned narratively and never fully “resolved,” not that grief can truly resolve, but the author didn't come to a satisfying fulfillment of that particular thread of character development.
Finally, I found that some of the secondary characters got far more fleshing out than others - Fabrisse was a fully developed person, but Jean-Paul was less so, and the hints we got about him were interesting so it was disappointing that we never got the whole story.
Ultimately this story was charming, and the historical flashbacks were really great. But overall I found that there were things left unfinished in the contemporary storyline.
