The Curator of Broken Things Trilogy: Full Trilogy - Hardcover

Gantz, Corine S

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0983436681 ISBN 13: 9780983436683

Publisher: Carpenter Hill Publishing, 2019

Synopsis

With her twins in college and her ex-husband off to a younger pasture, Cassie is resigned to a disappointing life in Los Angeles, until she reluctantly returns to Paris to visit her ailing father. There, she discovers the existence of an estranged aunt, a woman of many secrets who lives in a beautiful house in Paris’s exclusive Cité des Fleurs. Dumbfounded by what she learns, Cassie sets out on a quest to understand her family’s past and make sense of her father’s cold indifference toward her.

In Paris, as the truth about her failed marriage begins to take form, Cassie fights with her family, grapples with French idiosyncrasies and her own, and attempts to resist the charms of a good-looking Parisian who rides a vintage motorcycle.

From the last gasp of the Ottoman Empire to Paris of the 1920s to the prewar French Riviera to the World War II Allied landing in North Africa, the extraordinary story of her family unfolds to reveal the burdens Cassie has carried her entire life.

THE CURATOR OF BROKEN THINGS is a family-saga trilogy that takes place over a century. The novel weaves multiple narrative threads, each revealing new sides of the story until three generations of secrets are revealed that might bring a family together or tear it apart.

Book 1. FROM SMYRNA TO PARIS. Everything Cassie believes about her father is turned on its head when she meets an estranged elderly aunt more than willing to expose family secrets that have created riffs across generations. From an ancient city in the Ottoman Empire to Paris in the Roaring Twenties to a desperate escape from Nazi annihilation, Cassie begins to unearth her family’s past and its impact on who she has become.

Book 2. ESCAPE TO THE CÔTE D’AZUR,

A family flees Paris at the dawn of the Second World War, haunted by secrets that threaten to rip them apart. Seventy years later, Cassie, in modern-day Paris, finds herself alone frantically trying to confront her hostile relatives. Meanwhile, puzzled by the advances of a charming Frenchman, she struggles to cope with the demands of her manipulative ex and gain an understanding of her true self.

Book 3. RESISTANCE IN ALGIERS

Amidst he chaos of the Second World War, and having taken refuge in North Africa, Cassie’s parents and grandparents enter the French Resistance. As the Nazi threat tightens its noose, they find love and risk their lives and one another’s. In modern-day Paris, Cassie, now on the cusp of a surprising and disorienting love interest, has to conquer her fear of failure and success. When the last shocking piece of her family’s puzzle comes into her possession, Cassie must unburden herself from several generations of family secrets.

About this title

About the Author

Corine Gantz was born in France, where she spent the first twenty years of her life. She studied Contemporary Arts at the Sorbonne, and has worked in advertising and marketing in Paris, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Her first novel, Hidden in Paris, a story of friendship, love, food and dysfunction set in the City of Light was translated to nine languages and was followed by a cookbook with all the recipes in the novel.

Her new book trilogy, The Curator of Broken Things, is a fast-paced three part novel weaving multiple viewpoints across a century and is set in Paris, Algeria, and the South of France.

Corine lives and writes near Los Angeles with her husband Joe, a documentary filmmaker. They have two very creative sons working in music and film.

Review

'The Curator of Broken Things' by author Corine Gantz is a story told in a trilogy of books. Each book weaves threads from several characters living in different decades into a complex tapestry whose final pattern is only revealed at the end of Book 3. The books are rich with descriptive texture that lures the reader in to a time and place we most likely are not familiar with at all: Smyrna on the precipice of World War I. Setting this sweeping historical novel in exotic Smyrna gives us a fresh perspective on the WWII era. We are used to novels about the Jewish experience in Germany and Poland, for example. The author has a firm knowledge of actual history that underpins her narrative. Though WWII is the backstory, Gantz peppers the tale lightly with reference to the atrocities of war so as not to overpower the core of her saga which is the impact of family secrets on relationships. Still, the Velodrome D'Hiver (Vel d'Hiv) is mentioned enough that I'm embarrassed to say I had to Google it. I'm glad I did because it is a dark chapter in French history that I knew nothing about.

At the heart of this tale is an enduring romance of lovers fighting impossible odds to be together. The author deftly makes us champion this pair despite dilemmas and choices they make that some might consider amoral. The impact of those choices reverberates to the next generation and the generation after that. The story is presented as a journey of self-discovery by a contemporary divorced French woman--Cassandra-- who lives in Los Angeles and has to go back to Paris for a family emergency. Cassie's life is unraveling at the same time she is unraveling the secrets of her family's history.

I highly recommend 'The Curator of Broken Things' trilogy of books for your summer reading list- it will keep you thoroughly entertained.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carpenter Hill Publishing
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0983436681
• ISBN 13: 9780983436683
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 772