Dreaming in French by Vanessa McCausland

This is a book that gives the reader a mysteriously warm feeling and yet an intensely sad memorial of a past that is too raw to revisit; it is redolent of passion and the scent of oranges served with baguettes and the buttery saltiness of French cuisine. The fragrance of this book will linger long after the last page is turned!

Saskia is an Australian wife and mother in her 40s, lightly struggling with anxiety and her relationships, and exercising her artistic tendencies with her paper cut-out art sculptures. Into her medicated normality arrives the interruption of the announcement of an inheritance that forces her to confront her past. She has inherited half of a villa from a wealthy woman she met in the year she worked as an au pair on an idyllic French island. The villa must be visited to sign legal papers, but that also means she must confront her past and the man she thought may have loved her before the moment of awfulness of that year in her youth. Time has passed and Saskia has kept secrets from everyone in her present, and the things she had tried to forget are now confronting her stability, her sense of self as a mother and the things that she struggles with in her marriage.  Can she revisit the past with her family in tow and stay on an even keel, or will everything in her life be repaired by re-examining that part of her life from a different perspective?

This is an incredibly rich and layered story, switching between the past and the present, and with both French and English language and culture woven through the story. Relationship struggles across generations rear their head in different ways, and truth and lies are told for complex reasons. The story is told both in the present, but also through the resonance of the account from Saskia’s past told from her friend and benefactor’s perspective and from her own long suppressed memory. The scent of the past hangs mysteriously over the secrecy of Saskia’s present. There are whiffs of the power of ambition, charm, great wealth and their influence to subvert life. But there is also just a story of love and betrayal that could so easily have changed the paths of all the characters in the story. I loved the story and the complexity, and even the challenge of not having French language skills did not impede my enjoyment of this adult story. Vanessa McCausland knows how to weave a story that is both romantic (occasionally sensual and almost erotic) and profoundly moving.  Adult relationships are revealed with many layers of complexity and problems that younger readers may not yet be world-wise enough to understand.

Themes: France, Romance, Mystery, Relationship dysfunction and abuse, Mood disorders, Eating disorders, Same-sex attraction.

Carolyn Hull