Review: The Riviera House

After falling in love with Natasha Lester's The Paris Secret last year, I was going to read her next novel no matter what (as well as wanting to check out her backlist). Then I learned what The Riviera House was actually going to be about and I was bouncing off the walls with excitement. And good news, my friends. It lived up to my very high expectations. I absolutely loved it.

Here's the book's description:

Paris, 1939: The Nazis think Éliane can't understand German. They’re wrong. They think she’s merely cataloging art in a Louvre museum and unaware they’re stealing national treasures for their private collections. They have no idea she’s carefully decoding their notes and smuggling information to the Resistance. But Éliane is playing a dangerous game. Does she dare trust the man she once loved with her secrets, or will he only betray her once again? She has no way to know for certain . . . until a trip to a stunning home on the French Riviera brings a whole new level of peril.
Present Day: Wanting to forget the tragedy that has left her life in shambles, Remy Lang heads to a home she’s mysteriously inherited on the Riviera. While working on her vintage fashion business, she discovers a catalog of the artworks stolen during World War II and is shocked to see a painting that hung on her childhood bedroom wall. Who is her family, really? And does the Riviera house hold more secrets than Remy is ready to face?

There are certain topics I will read about no matter what. The theft of art from museums and Jewish families during World War II is one of those topics. It is fascinating and heartbreaking in equal measures and I don't think I had read a novel that treated it so well until The Riviera House. I love art but I don't live and breathe it like Éliane and Xavier (and others in the novel) did. But between my appreciation for art and the way Lester writes, I was on edge just like all the characters as pieces were coded and moved from the Louvre and then, later, as other pieces were picked over by Hermann Göring. I get so sad and frustrated when I think about all the art and artists Hitler decided were "degenerate." (Though, let's be honest, I get furious every time I think about what Hitler was up to.) Given I'm more of a fan of Impressionism and some modern art, that's not surprising. Those pieces are the ones that make my heart sing and he decided that there was something wrong with them. I just can't understand. And then there's the fact that he wanted all the best pieces for himself and would stop at nothing to get them. That meant pillaging museums and claiming art owned by Jewish families as his own. To this day, there are still so many pieces of art that have not been recovered or returned to their rightful owners. Part of that is because certain codes couldn't be broken and the Allies can't figure out where those artworks went. Some stolen pieces were hidden by Nazis and either never found or their families are hiding them (knowingly or unknowingly). And some pieces would have been destroyed - there's a scene in the book where a pile of paintings considered unsuitable by the Nazis were burned. Yes. You could say this is a topic I love and I am so appreciative of how Lester approached it.

Occupied France would have been a terrible place to be. Paris was overrun by Germans and the Nazis as they claimed the city as their own. They were ruthless if any Parisian retaliated - Éliane mentions at one point that the French had killed one German so the Germans turned around and killed many more Parisians, just to put them in their place. Éliane and her friends and family, all fighting for the Resistance in various ways, which meant risking their lives every single day. But what else could you do? I'd like to think I'd do the same - fight in whatever way I could, even if that meant "just" copying codes to determine where valuable pieces of art were being hidden (versus the active fighting we're groomed to think is more heroic). Éliane was a fictional character but she did work with a real war hero, Rose Valland. Valland was forced to work for the Nazis and she used that to her advantage and recorded where art was being moved to and helped save thousands of pieces of art. 

There's a modern timeline in this story as well which takes place in 2015. Remy was a hard character to really get a read on as she is so overtaken by her grief. But the pacing was well done and every time Lester switched timelines there was a purpose and I was ready to discover the next puzzle piece she was ready to offer me. The reader should be able to figure out a few things before Remy, which meant I was a bit annoyed with her behaviour - though I completely understood why the revelations she was met with would have been unsettling. I could feel everything, which is a testament to Lester's writing.

Readers may pick up The Riviera House for a number of reasons but the end result will be the same: falling absolutely and totally in love with Natasha Lester's latest novel. It's well written and well researched (without reading like a dry history textbook), with rich descriptions and a multitude of emotions. Read it. You won't be disappointed.

Review of The Paris Secret is here.

*An egalley was provided by the Canadian distributor, HBG Canada, via NetGalley in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*