The Dressmaker's Gift by Fiona Valpy

"But if the 'ordinary people' do nothing then who is going to step forward and take a stand against the Nazis? Not the politicians in Vichy who are puppets of the new regime; and not the French army whose battalions lie rotting in shallow graves along the Eastern Front. We are all that is left, Claire. Ordinary people like you and me."
                    -Mireille, from the novel

I recently read The Winemaker's Wife by Kristin Harmel which was centered around the WWII French Resistance movement among winemakers in France. The Dressmaker's Gift is an excellent companion novel involving the same setting and some comparable situations. Both were well-written with fascinating stories of heroism during horrible times. I do believe the former was a little less-intense since the latter ventured more deeply into German atrocities.

In 2017 British protagonist Harriet Shaw, who is reeling after the suicide of her mother, accepts a one-year internship in Paris with a PR agency specializing in fashion. She had found a photograph among her mother's keepsakes that revealed 3 young women of the 1940's standing in front of the shop window of Delavigne, Couturier. One woman she knows is her grandmother, Claire. Harriet says, "I don't usually believe in fate, but it felt as if a force was at work, drawing me to Paris. Leading me to the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Bringing me here. To the building in the photograph." Harriet ends up working and living in the same building as her grandmother so many years before. Naturally she begins learning all she can about her maternal grandmother, including from a coworker, Simone, who happens to be the granddaughter of one of the other two women in the photograph, Mireille.

I have visited Paris, so I enjoyed reading about familiar sites. The author has Harriet experiencing, indirectly, the terrorist attack in Nice on Bastille Day. That was a shockingly memorable event. I thought it was an interesting comparison/contrast to atrocities of the '40s.

While Harriet narrates her own story, the rest is in third person---telling the WWII experience of Claire, Mireille and their friend, Vivienne, all seamstresses at Delavigne who become involved in the dangerous Resistance Movement standing up to the German occupation of France. Their story is gripping although not really entertaining. I am sure you can guess what I mean. I will rate this historical novel a 5 and likely look for another by this author.