The Race for Paris

Summary (from the publisher): The New York Times bestselling author of The Wednesday Sisters returns with a moving and powerfully dynamic World War II novel about two American journalists and an Englishman, who together race the Allies to Occupied Paris for the scoop of their lives

Normandy, 1944. To cover the fighting in France, Jane, a reporter for the Nashville Banner, and Liv, an Associated Press photographer, have already had to endure enormous danger and frustrating obstacles—including strict military regulations limiting what women correspondents can do. Even so, Liv wants more.

Encouraged by her husband, the editor of a New York newspaper, she’s determined to be the first photographer to reach Paris with the Allies, and capture its freedom from the Nazis.

However, her Commanding Officer has other ideas about the role of women in the press corps. To fulfill her ambitions, Liv must go AWOL. She persuades Jane to join her, and the two women find a guardian angel in Fletcher, a British military photographer who reluctantly agrees to escort them. As they race for Paris across the perilous French countryside, Liv, Jane, and Fletcher forge an indelible emotional bond that will transform them and reverberate long after the war is over.

Based on daring, real-life female reporters on the front lines of history like Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Miller, and Martha Gellhorn—and with cameos by other famous faces of the time—The Race for Paris is an absorbing, atmospheric saga full of drama, adventure, and passion. Combining riveting storytelling with expert literary craftsmanship and thorough research, Meg Waite Clayton crafts a compelling, resonant read.\

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this novel from HarperCollins. Based on the true story of female reporters during World War II, this novel is told from the perspective of Jane, a reporter from the Nashville Banner who is covering the fighting in France. While there, Jane meets Liv, an Associated Press photographer, who is determined that they will be the first to report out of liberated Paris - despite the strict military regulations prohibiting women from traveling that close to the front. Liv decides to go AWOL, taking Jane with her. Along the way, they gain the help of Fletcher, a British military photographer, and together the trio travel closer and closer to the action, documenting a permanent record of the atrocities of the war.

 

There's a lot of tension between the three colleagues. Liv is married to Charles Harper, the editor in chief of the New York Press. Her husband is friends with Fletcher, but that doesn't stop the two from being drawn to each other. Meanwhile, Jane is developing a crush on Fletcher, while trying to get over the boy who back home who left her to marry a much wealthier girl. While the primary focus was on the war and their correspondence work, their tension between the trio is palpable, and the author did a great job setting the scene for each of the three's personal trials that led to their present circumstances.

 

This novel does an excellent job describing the scenes of war, making it fitting that the narrator is a war reporter. "I was watching the Count finger a patient's intestines for bullet holes and shell fragments in the beam of a flashlight" (16). Jane, Liv, and Fletcher witness the gruesome aftermath of war on France - the wounded, the stripped countryside, starving children, decaying bodies. However at times the novel felt like it devoted almost too much time to setting the stage and describing the war. It almost felt like a fictionalized history of what war reporters would have experienced in France rather than a novel detailing the story of three individuals. "It seemed every journalist in France lounged in the lobby that morning or crowded into the basement bar [...]. Floyd Davis of Life had sketched a colored-pencil cartoon of the bar scene: a brutish Ernest Hemingway, Janet Flanner, and William Shirer of CBS at the front table while Lee Miller and others partied in the background and Robert Capa, in battle dress, observed" (212). At times I wondered if the result of the author's interest and research into female reporters would have resulted in a stronger non-fiction account than a novel.

 

This was a fast read about a facet of the second world war that is rarely covered in detail in other novels of the time period. I enjoyed reading about pioneering female reporters who seized the opening the war gave them to demonstrate that women could write and photograph just as well as men, while also documenting the war for generations to come.

 

Stars: 3.5