Emma's Review: The Resistance Bakery by Siobhan Curham

Reviewed by Emma Crowley

Paris, 1943. The scent of fresh baguettes hangs in the air as Coralie unbolts the door to her bakery with trembling fingers. She must get out of the city. Hiding her precious leather recipe book inside her coat, she promises never to let the secret locations of the people she worked tirelessly to save fall into German hands…

Present day. Raven is unhappy about being shipped off to the other side of the country for the summer to stay with the mysterious French grandmother she barely knows. And discovering a tattered, leather-bound book with yellowed pages full of handwritten recipes and coded numbers, she is stunned.

Her grandmother has never baked for her. And she refuses to talk about Paris, or the past. Flipping through the book, a faded photograph of a laughing couple falls out. As Raven scans the writing on the back she can scarcely believe her eyes…

What really happened in that tiny French bakery all those years ago? And could this forgotten recipe book finally bring healing to a woman still haunted by wartime secrets? Or has Raven’s discovery shattered any chance of bonding with her grandmother, before her time runs out? 

Book Links: Kindle or Paperback

Many thanks to Bookouture via NetGalley for my copy of The Resistance Bakery to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.

Siobhan Curham’s new novel The Resistance Bakery takes readers to the heart of the City of Lights, Paris. An intriguing, dual timeline story unfolds of one woman’s determination to do her bit to rise up against the Germans who have occupied the city she calls home. The chapters are short and move back and forth between Paris during the war years and America in 1984. From the outset, I much preferred the chapters set in Paris and found myself rushing through the American chapters in order to get back to the female heroine, Coralie, and her experiences of working for the resistance right under the noses of the Abwehr, the German intelligence service. The first half of the book, truthfully I found to be quite slow going but around the midpoint, the plot picked up and I became more invested for the eventual outcome for the characters.

In 1984, Cindy, although she prefers to be known as Raven, is only 13 but is being shipped off to the grandmother she doesn’t know very well at all so her parents can work on their marriage. Raven was a ball of anxiety not because of the situation with her parents, more so she is worried about the threat of nuclear war. She regularly skips school and has displayed challenging behaviours but deep down I think she was insecure. To be honest, I didn’t care much for Raven as I felt she was so young what would she possibly bring to the story but the further I read the more I came to understand that she was the conduit that would bring the past and present together and things might come full circle. The inquisitive side of her wants to get to know her grandmother Coralie better and when she discovers a photo of the Eiffel Tower and subsequently a photograph album and also a notebook with recipes she wants to dig deeper and find out about her grandmother's past. 

Coralie adores baking and cooking and through this medium she slowly starts to forge a bond with Raven and reveals her story. We come to know and appreciate all that she went through during the war but there are still unresolved issues, and something is eating away at Coralie. What is revealed is surprising and shocking and it’s only as I delved deeper into the chapters set during the war that I began to form a clearer and much bigger picture of Coralie. The woman she was during those troubling and difficult times, why she did certain things and why she has kept things and some aspects unresolved.

As previously mentioned, right from the first chapter introducing the reader to Coralie in Paris, this is what held my attention. In fact I wanted these chapters to be longer with more significant events that would have driven the plot further on much earlier rather than at the point at which I felt this occurred. Coralie was abandoned on a doorstep in Paris when she was a baby and adopted by Arnaud and his wife Olive who taught her everything she knows about baking and pastries. They have since died and Coralie is 18 and has worked as a housekeeper for former opera singer Madame Monteux. But now Madame Monteux has gotten her a job in the Hotel Lutetia which has been a refuge for artists, musicians, writers and politicians who have fled Germany as their views go against those of the Hitler and the Nazi’s. But times are changing and soon Coralie’s beautiful city is under Nazi occupation. The hotel once a place where she felt safe and secure and could indulge in her passion for pastry is not what it once was. It has been taken over by the Abwehr and is now the centre for German Intelligence.

Food, baking and in particular cakes and pastries play a prominent role throughout the book and it works very well for it is how Coralie can work for the Resistance. She is given a shop to turn into her own patisserie thanks to Madame Monteux but at the same time her talents do not go unnoticed by the Germans and she is given a job working once a week supplying cakes and pastries for the top brass in the intelligence division. She is astute and knows that this can play to her advantage and yes, she threaded a very fine line throughout the book maintaining one façade whilst working in the kitchen but when not there she was doing her best to protect her beloved Madame Monteux who was Jewish. 

It’s obvious Coralie didn’t need to do anything for the war effort but I felt she wasn’t the kind of person who could sit back and let many injustices befall people she held close to her heart but she also hated the way her city was forced to curtail to people who had no right to be there. Fellow resistance members work with her at the hotel and she is also tasked with doing certain things that if discovered would put her own shop under threat. At times, I felt there really wasn’t much happening and with each new chapter months would have passed or it would be a new year. Personally, I needed a little more excitement, secrecy or mystery in the first half and I was longing for it. For as much as I loved Coralie as a character I wanted to see her challenged and pushed beyond her limits a bit more. That came in the later half and yes it was worth the wait.

The second half felt as if it was a different story to what had gone before, I became much involved with the story unfolding. The plot regarding the German chef Reinhardt took a surprising turn and I thought it was divisive and would give much food for thought and opportunity for discussion for readers. It meant a different side to Coralie emerged and she was forced to battle between her conscience, what was morally right and her heart. Initially, I felt anger that she would go against what she stood for and was trying to achieve and then I thought but doesn’t everyone deserve some form of happiness? 

The last quarter or so there were plenty of shocks and twists and turns and some jaw dropping moments that shake Coralie to her very foundation and set her on a path very different from the one she first ventured upon when she began to engage in resistance work. I myself was shocked because the author had led me to believe one thing and I was so certain of it and then within a paragraph my opinions rapidly changed. But how does this feed into Coralie and Raven in the present? If you wish to know you’ll have to get a copy of this book and discover the answers for yourself.

The Resistance Bakery, although not my favourite read by Siobhan Curham, brought to light another facet of the war that I knew nothing about. It’s a story of courage, bravery, heartbreak, connections and heroism and a good inclusion to the World War Two historical fiction genre.