Dusty Dawn

(from back of dust jacket) After a journey to France just after the Second Great War with her aunt and uncle for her "arranged" marriage with Jeremy, Laurie finds romance, mystery and adventure awaiting her. Shy and fearful Giselle, aloof, beautiful Diana, and stern, mysterious Jacques, taunt her imagination. Her own feeling of indifference to Jeremy and a certain hostility which she senses the others feel towards her marriage, are unsettling from the start. Laurie becomes drawn into the lives of all these people -- particularly that of Jacques, who bears the atmosphere of bitterness and hate which the maquisards feel for French collaborators. Anne Duffield shows with skill and clarity how a belated desire for vengeance affects Laurie and how love helps her resolve an attitude of mind about it both for herself and for other people.

This is another one I bought for the jacket -- I'd never read anything by Anne Duffield -- and ended up really enjoying. A lot heavier themes than you find in most light women's fiction: the moral accommodations people make in difficult historical circumstances, justice, accountability, and the relative costs and merits of looking forward and looking back. I'm actually surprised she was able to slip all this through in the '40s when there was a real reluctance on the part of category-style romance publishers to include such intense war-related stuff. Beyond that, there's a decent amount of suspense in a gothic-lite setting and the male MC is particularly well-drawn: he's sympathetic and imperfect and the reader can appreciate both the female MC's admiration and her frustration. A good amount of discussion about the Maquis, who are portrayed in a generally positive, but not unnuanced, light. I can't speak to the accuracy of Duffield's assessment of French and English cultural temperament and how that shaped the country's respective postwar experiences, but it made for a kind of fascinating read. If you're French or English and have an interest in this period, chime in!