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THE QUEEN OF PARIS by Pamela Binnings Ewen

THE QUEEN OF PARIS

by Pamela Binnings Ewen

Pub Date: April 7th, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9825-4684-7
Publisher: Blackstone

Coco Chanel schemes to save her company in Ewen’s (An Accidental Life, 2013, etc.) novel based on the life of the fashion icon.

1940, France: Coco Chanel gets the devastating news that the man who financed her company and paved the way for her iconic success in the fashion industry has stolen the formula for Chanel No. 5. Betrayed and self-righteous, Coco does everything she can think of to thwart his plan, first by trying to buy out France’s jasmine supply, and then by mounting legal countermeasures. One of her darkest weapons: her willingness to challenge Pierre’s rights based on the fact that he is Jewish, for Paris soon falls under Nazi control. As she desperately fights to save her company, Coco also tries to make a deal with her lover, a Nazi spy, to save her nephew (really her son). Spatz agrees to help, as long as Coco will first travel to Spain, there to spy on her vast network of friends and acquaintances and uncover secret information that could bring Spain into the war as a German ally. Ewen’s Coco is a proud and image-conscious character, sprung from a painful, lonely childhood to become a self-made triumph. A Machiavellian madame, she is quite willing to live comfortably in the Hotel Ritz in Paris, surrounded by Nazi officers, as the rest of her country falls to ruin, as the Jews are rounded up and “counted” and then begin disappearing. She’s a hard character to like, but her uncompromising sense of self-worth does inspire grudging admiration at times. Unfortunately, this independent stance indirectly facilitates the horrors of the Holocaust. Perhaps the most uncomfortable effect of Ewen’s story, then, is the way it makes the reader wonder: Would I have understood the true horror of the Nazis’ plans any better than Coco? Would I have taken action, or would I, too, have let the war pass me by?

More morality play than fashion fable; a reminder that fame does not always guarantee goodness or likability.