Outcast Artist in Bretagne. My Five Star Review.

 

Unmarried mother-to-be Norah, a talented artist, fled to her cousin in France to avoid scandal in England. When the Germans invaded the country, she was trapped.

Outcast in Bretagne is a story about of love that seems doomed. Star crossed Norah and Commandant August von Gottlieb create more scandal and problems than Norah could never have imagined. If their secrets were discovered they would face torture and death. Norah’s were not only about her pregnancy and August’s were connected to his increasing disillusionment with Hitler’s dictatorship.

 Ms Scott-Lewis brings to life Norah and August’s emerging love, her cousin’s surly husband and loveable children, members of the local resistance party, the villagers’ suffering and their attitudes. She also shows August in his official capacity, his brutal Nazi second-in-command, arrogant soldiers who have no respect for the conquered, and his right hand man, a young officer who approves of August’s mild regime which conflicts with instructions to implement harsher rules.

I enjoy descriptions of places I visit in fiction. This talented author swept me to the Southern   coast of Bretagne “with its rugged outline, a buttress against the forceful ocean waves that slapped the stone slope. The dark indigo of the Bay of Biscay reflected a blue spring sky.” I also like her description of the village. “Across the square Norah passed the pretty thatched, or slate-roofed houses of stone and headed down the road. Larger buildings of stone or plaster on stone, some with chalky-blue shutters, lined the weathered to grey fish market structure. Purple irises poked up in tiny gardens.”

I also appreciate this link to the past. “Brittany was a place of Catholic pilgrimage that linked the towns of seven saints of Britany. Those Celtic monks from Britain had brought Christianity to Bretagne in the fifth or sixth century.”

This historical, romantic novel gripped me from beginning to end.