You know how you sometimes go through phases in your reading life, when you’re consistently drawn to books about a certain person, place, or time? I happen to be going through a Paris phase, due in large part to our hopes of visiting the City of Light in about a year’s time. And so these days I find myself particularly attracted to novels featuring anything Eiffel on the cover.

Thus, Melanie Benjamin’s newest release, Mistress of the Ritz, caught my eye. I was also captured by the story behind the story. As Benjamin explains in her Author’s Notes, she was drawn to this under-explored sliced of history, set in a specific place (the Ritz) that serves as a character in its own right. It just so happens these are two reasons I hold for wanting to read a book. I was hooked.

Mistress of the Ritz is clearly thoroughly researched, and I certainly did enjoy the benefit of all the author’s work. I learned not only about an interesting place but the fascinating people and times that made it so.

But while I can and do appreciate a book on these objective merits, often my ultimate evaluation is based on how a book makes me feel. The mood it puts me in, and whether it leaves me feeling uplifted or downcast. With this as my criteria, I can’t offer Mistress of the Ritz the high marks I was hoping for. The main issue lies with its two main protagonists. I just didn’t like them. Didn’t care for their values and behaviors, their relationships, and especially not their marriage. It was hard to want to linger with them.

Then, too, the novel as a whole had a rather salacious feel to it that did not appeal. It came across as gossipy and crude. Granted, this was a complicated, difficult story to tell, but I’d hoped for more of a redemptive ending.

Still, if you’re a fan of French Resistance histfic, and if you’re in it for the historical detail as much as the entertainment, you may want to give Mistress of the Ritz it a try.

Thanks to Delacorte Press for providing me this book free of charge. All opinions are mine.

From the back cover:

Nothing bad can happen at the Ritz; inside its gilded walls every woman looks beautiful, every man appears witty. Favored guests like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor walk through its famous doors to be welcomed and pampered by Blanche Auzello and her husband, Claude, the hotel’s director. The Auzellos are the mistress and master of the Ritz, allowing the glamour and glitz to take their minds off their troubled marriage, and off the secrets that they keep from their guests—and each other.

Until June 1940, when the German army sweeps into Paris, setting up headquarters at the Ritz. Suddenly, with the likes of Hermann Goëring moving into suites once occupied by royalty, Blanche and Claude must navigate a terrifying new reality. One that entails even more secrets and lies. One that may destroy the tempestuous marriage between this beautiful, reckless American and her very proper Frenchman. For in order to survive—and strike a blow against their Nazi “guests”—Blanche and Claude must spin a web of deceit that ensnares everything and everyone they cherish.

But one secret is shared between Blanche and Claude alone—the secret that, in the end, threatens to imperil both of their lives, and to bring down the legendary Ritz itself.

Based on true events, Mistress of the Ritz is a taut tale of suspense wrapped up in a love story for the ages, the inspiring story of a woman and a man who discover the best in each other amid the turbulence of war.

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publication date: May 21, 2019

About the author:

Melanie Benjamin is the New York Times bestselling author of Alice I Have Been, The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, The Aviator’s Wife, The Swans of Fifth Avenue, and The Girls in the Picture. Benjamin lives in Chicago, where she is at work on her next historical novel.

Connect with the author: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook

Buy it here.

Thanks to Delacortes Press for providing me a copy of this book free of charge. All opinions are mine.