Written by Jenny Colgan, The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris follows Anna Trent as she is sent to France after an accident that leaves her toe-less. Yes, you read that right — toe-less. Not all of her toes, just two (I’ll go into that later). Anyways, through connections from teacher-turned-friend Claire, she gets a job at one of the most famous chocolate shops in Paris. It’s here that she’ll meet some pretty interesting characters, including the owner and renowned chocolatier, Thierry Girard, and his estranged son, Laurent, who may change her life for the better.
As I mentioned earlier, the beginning of this novel finds Anna waking up in the hospital after having a horrible accident at work — the local chocolate factory — which resulted in the loss of her toes. I found this a bit random and, frankly, a weird way to start this story. I trudged on, believing that this would have some relevance later on…it didn’t. That doesn’t mean Colgan doesn’t bring it up one hundred and three more times throughout the story. Seriously, I get it. She’s missing two toes and it’s taking time to learn to walk off balance, but what does that have to do with the rest of the story? In some ways, it felt like Colgan would fill pages up with these pointless inner monologues that ended up adding nothing to the overall story, which brings me to my biggest pet peeve in books — stories that are too long. I absolutely cannot stand reading a story that could’ve been at least one hundred pages shorter and that’s when I take to task whoever edited this novel. The story droned on and on and on, to the point where I had to put the book down several times because I was so bored. What kind of editor would let an author get away with this? Moving on...
The relationship between the characters never made sense to me. Once you’re introduced to all of them, that’s where the excitement ends. From Thierry’s rude and standoffish wife, Alice, who gets no real wrap-up to her storyline, to Anna and Laurent’s love story (if you want to call it that) that goes from zero to one-hundred within a second. Colgan even creates one chapter specifically as an inner monologue for Laurent in which he “discovers” he’s in love with Anna. You really needed a chapter to tell the audience that? And don’t even get me started on Anna’s feelings for him. Colgan handles it in exactly the same manner, but instead of actually having both Anna and Laurent have an actual conversation about this, they just make out and realize that they’re "it" for each other. If that is a French thing, the closest relationship I want with anything French is with their bread or fries — I’m not picky. By the end, it felt like Colgan didn’t know how to wrap up each character’s storyline, so she gave them all quick summaries and that was the end. Hell, Claire didn’t even get a proper send-off. It all felt so unsatisfactory that I really did ask myself why Colgan even bothered with writing this story to begin with. Hell, even the epilogue did a horrible job at wrapping things up. All of a sudden the last chapter goes from “hearing sirens and people freaking out,” to the epilogue in which we read that Anna still continues to work with Laurent. That’s all we get? Really? I really needed Colgan to fill in the blanks. I know the sirens alluded to Claire's passing, but to make such a big deal about this character and end it in that way felt like a disservice to a character we were supposed to care about. Maybe there was another chapter that just got left out but because the editor was already so bored with the story, she didn’t stick to the end to discover pages were missing? That seems like the most plausible answer to me…
Normally, a book of this nature doesn’t take that long to get through, but while I started this book at the beginning of February, I kept having to put it down because the story never got to the point where I felt like I had to pull an all-nighter just to finish. All my bookworms know what I’m talking about. It usually comes towards the middle of the novel when you’re just so desperate to know how the story ends that you cancel all your remaining plans that day just to finish it. Well, I never got that moment. I actually had to force myself to finish over the weekend. To me, that is a sign of a poor story.
As you can probably guess, I was disappointed with this novel. I picked it because I thought it would be a cute story about working in a chocolate shop and finding love, which ended up being more of the backstory than anything else. With an inconclusive and anti-climatic ending, the only thing The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris made me feel was annoyance — that I actually spent money on a novel with this amount of lifeless dialogue and characters.
What did you think of this novel? Let me know in the comments below!
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