Any fellow bookworms out there will know that the feeling of finishing a good novel is quite unlike any other. With your hunger to solve the mystery of the plot finally sated, your thirst for vivid descriptions quenched, and your bookmark finally freed, you are ready to revel in your satisfaction. Perhaps for a moment, wishing that you could read it for the first time again, you might mourn the loss of the version of yourself that existed a few moments ago when you were blissfully unaware of the bittersweet ending. But nevertheless you feel quite content.
My attachment to this feeling is what has unfortunately kept me from reading non-fiction in the past. My overwhelmingly negative (and mistaken) view, was that there was no sense of fulfilment to be found in reading a non-fiction book; knowledge could be gained, but that was pretty much it. So I was pretty surprised to find that when I started reading ‘Les Parisiennes’ by Anne Sebba, I was hooked.
By following the lives and journeys of various Parisian women through the Nazi Occupation of the city, Sebba creates a captivating narrative element to her retelling of their stories, a trait which I find surprisingly hard to come across in books that follow historical events. A deeper look into the ventures of famously ‘collaborationist’ women such as Coco Chanel and daughters of the Vichy puppet state that answered to Nazi high command are discussed, whilst the roles of women who undoubtedly helped fight, organise and win the war are finally recognised, something that sources contemporary to the defeat of the Nazis so often omitted.
So whether you’re a well-seasoned non-fiction reader, or you’re looking for something different to your usual novel, I cannot recommend this one enough. If you do read the book and fancy having a ‘book-club’ style chat about about it, or if you would even like to borrow my copy, I would be more than happy to oblige - just pop me an email :) t.hollyman11@jcg.sch.je
Tamsin Hollyman Yr12
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