Welcome to my stop on the tour for the soon to be released “The Confectioner’s Tale” by Laura Madeleine

Synopsis from 

I would like to say a big thank you to Naomi Mantin at Transworld Books for approving me to read and review this piece and also to Laura Madeleine for writing it. This was an absolute joy of a read.

I will admit to being slightly biased on this one as it did get some brownie points (sorry “macaroons” does not quite fit here) for being about patisseries and for being set in Paris.  But not to worry, this only played a minor part in the rating.

Let me first say that this piece is absolutely flawless, not one false note. It is one of the best romance/historical fiction works I have come across.

“The Confectioner’s Tale” is a story about love, not only in the traditional sense of the term between a man and a woman, but it is also the love of a granddaughter for her grandfather and the love of a Chef patissier for his craft and the woman of his life.

This tale will take you to a Paris that is now unknown to most of us, in the 1910s in the Belle Epoque era. You will also journey to a Cambridge in the late 80s, to a time not so far in the past, where the use of coins into a pay phone was necessary to make a phone call and where digital communication was not a common use. Amongst all those places and through the writing, you will somehow be able to sample the fragrances and have a taste of all the flavours scattered throughout.

Within this flavoured décor there is however this young lady Petra, student of words, a passion she shares with her now deceased grandfather who she adored and looked up to.  Petra will be taken on a journey to the past to a very different time where she will be on a mission to preserve the integrity of a grandfather and by doing so having to decide to maybe sacrifice the only path to a future that until now made sense.

There are so many things about this novel that I loved that I would need to go through quite a long list to name them all. What stays with me however is how rich and full this tale is, and it is rich in so many ways. It is true of the passionate and very human characters created as well as for the very detailed and impeccably described Parisian landscapes of that time.

What is most important however, is that I was told a beautiful tale by a story teller who herself loves her craft.

LaChouett