The Paper Girl of Paris

The Paper Girl of Paris opens with 16-year-old Alice and her family travelling to Paris. The mood in the taxi taking them to their destination is tense—Alice’s family rarely fights, but they also rarely talk about the hard things they face, either. So when Alice’s Gram passes away, and leaves an apartment to Alice instead of her mother, her family side-steps the tough conversation as to why it was left to Alice and not her mother. Things get even more complicated when they discover the apartment has sat untouched for decades. Alice wants to learn all about her Gram’s history while her mother falls into a deeper depression.

Alice decides to delve into the apartment to learn about her Gram on her own, and she quickly discovers a huge secret: Gram had a sister who appeared to be a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. As Gram had been notoriously secretive about her life growing up in Paris, no one in the family knew that Gram had a sister. Alice finds her great-aunt Adalyn’s diary and begins translating the French pages to English to understand how Adalyn could be photographed with Nazi soldiers and to learn if her Gram was involved in any way.

At this point in the narrative, chapters begin to switch between Alice’s current time point of view and Adalyn’s 1940’s point of view. As you read about Adalyn’s perspective, Alice uncovers more events in Adalyn’s diary. The diary, however, does not reveal the depth of Adalyn’s resistance to Germany’s occupation of France, and so the reader continuously has more information than Alice. This imbalance of knowledge opens space for Alice’s storyline to develop more “day to day” conflict: her mother’s struggles with mental health, Alice’s romantic mishaps, and the option to sell the apartment and leave the history behind. Alice wavers as to whether she wants to continue her investigation as she is ashamed that her great-aunt may have ties to Nazis, but her quest to learn more and to piece together the history of her family keeps her focused.

The Paper Girl of Paris is an enjoyable read that does a good job of connecting two very distinct plotlines and perspectives. Both characters were believable and charming in their own ways, and the novel creates engaging stories for Alice and Adalyn with compelling side characters along the way. The text never felt like a competition; Adalyn and Alice’s struggles weren’t compared or contrasted with one another, and the differences between the two realities were connected through a common thread of caring about family and staying strong, even when things seem impossibly hard. The romance of Paris and the courage of both girls are likely to hook readers who wouldn’t typically pick up a historical fiction piece, readers who will then have the opportunity to learn about those resisting the German presence in France and surviving the horrors of World War II. While the big “Aha!” moment towards the end of the narrative is predictable, readers will still be rooting for it to happen and for the characters to have some sense of resolution. The novel is dynamic in its approach to the struggles of being a teenager, and talks about the complexity of not only living with mental illness but the difficulty of having a parent who struggles with their mental health.