Last fall I picked up the first book in the La Vie en Roses series, Once Upon a Rose. Due to some ridiculous writing by the New York Times at about the same time, my review of that book is mostly subsumed by my rage about the way genre writing is discussed by major reviewers. However, I found much to be enjoyed in Laura Florand’s writing, and was excited to return to the South of France for a little refueling between One of Us is Lying, The Hate U Give, and Missoula.
In A Wish Upon Jasmine Florand continues playing with tropes and deconstructing classic story structure, but this one is a quite a bit less light and frothy. In A Wish Upon Jasmine the trope Florand is tweaking is the “Big Misunderstanding” that usually takes place much later in standard Romance fare. Usually the “Big Misunderstanding” is what keeps the main couple apart, some occurrence which they have come to opposite conclusions. For this book the “Big Misunderstanding” happens before the beginning of the book and in much the same way that Loretta Chase’s A Duke in Shining Armor the reader is dropped into action already in progress. Unfortunately, Florand did not do it as well as Chase, but that is a very high standard indeed.
In the second book in the series we are following the relationship of Damien Rosier, the self-appointed “mean one” in this generation of his family, following the lead of his father and grandfather. He is really the glue that holds his family’s (and hometown’s) perfume business together. It falls to Damien to take care of the money that finances his family’s dreams and to that end he has created around himself a steel shell, but it protects his soft heart. Six months ago he met Jess and fell head over heels following a one night stand, but she ghosted him based on several factors in her life. Neither has really recovered.
Enter Tante Colette, our story engine. She gifts Jess the Rosier’s family perfume shop in Grasse where she can get back to the nuts and bolts of her profession and put together the pieces of her family history. We then spend the next two thirds of the book watching Damien turn himself inside out to repair the relationship with Jess while she is naïve to the point of emotional blindness. It made for a slog of a read both in the beginning while trying to figure out what happened before the book began and piecing together the timeline, and then in the back half watching the main characters slam together like rocks falling off a cliff.
And these two things are what keep me from wanting to rate this anything above 2.5 stars. But Florand wrote dynamic, fully fleshed out characters in an evocative settings with an emotionally vulnerable hero and she also portrays the intensity of emotional and sexual attraction with a deft hand, and it makes me want to rate this 3 stars or slightly higher. I am at an impasse with myself.
Looking over the book descriptions of this series and her L’Amour et Chocolate series I think I am going to go back to those books and start again. While I am interested in seeing what comes to pass with the other Rosier cousins (official and otherwise) I think I want to go back and lay in more groundwork with the work of a contemporary writer whose craft I appreciate.
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