The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris by Evie Woods - Paris in July

After years of nursing her mother through a final illness in Dublin, Edie Lane realizes she needs to challenge herself by doing something different. Searching online, she finds a job as the Assistant Manager of a bakery in Paris, which seems perfect – her parents had honeymooned in Paris and always talked about visiting as a family and her father is a pastry chef. But when Edie reaches La Boulangerie sur la Rue De Compiègne in Paris, she learns her mistake: her new employer is La Boulangerie sur la Rue de Paris in Compiègne, an hour north of Paris!

Edie’s dream of a glamorous new life in Paris is over before it began. Even worse, no one seems very pleased to see her in Compiègne. Madame Moreau and Manu, the boy who works at the bakery, are distant. Her attic room above the shop is cold and her French inadequate. But Edie is too proud to give up and go home, and soon she has another problem – there is some kind of mystery in the basement that harks back to Pierre Moreau, the legendary owner during WWII.

With flour-dusted hands, Manu began kneading a large pillow of dough and I tried to follow his eyeline to see if I could spot the head baker. At first, I couldn’t see anything; he seemed to be staring straight at the ovens. Then I began to notice a flicker . . . once, twice. A person, man, I thought, but his outline seemed hazy. Instinctively, I rubbed my eyes, thinking this would give me a clearer view. Gradually, a strange feeling came over me; a heaviness that had not been their moments earlier. That was when I fainted.

As Edie starts to make friends, including the handsome but secretive Hugo Chadwick, she begins to feel part of the boulangerie and will fight for its threatened future.

Just as Edie thought she was taking a job in Paris, I thought I was choosing a book for Paris in July, so we were both wrong! However, Compiègne has quite a history of its own, which I enjoyed learning about, and the backstory of Pierre Moreau, the shy baker who adopted a woman and her daughter escaping from the Nazis, added an element to this story that distinguishes it from what seems like an overcrowded sub-genre of perky heroines discovering themselves in bakeries or bookstores. To help save the boulangerie, Edie reveals unexpected baking skills and even singing ability! I liked the variety of friends Edie makes: a tour guide, a hairdresser, a musician, and a lawyer, not to mention Hugo, who shares his beloved copy of Proust with her (a sign that he is worth keeping even when he seems like a heartless capitalist). Edie’s father, back in Ireland, provides sage advice from Dublin, even though he clearly doesn’t want his only child going so far away. Altogether, it was a very pleasant, if predictable, story, although Edie spends only a few hours in Paris.  And because there are flashbacks to WWII, I am also counting this as my tenth book for the Intrepid Reader's 2025 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge (I was confident Marg would like this one, then saw she had also just read it).

Title: The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris
Author: Evie Woods
Publication: HarperCollins UK, Trade Paperback, 2014
Genre: Fiction
Source: Library

Fun Fact: Tennis player/star Suzanne Lenglen (1899–1938) came from Compiègne!