By: Pam Jenoff
Narrated by: Elizabeth Knowelden, Henrietta Meire, Candace Thaxton
Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins

I was looking for a book to listen to with my sister on our trip to celebrate the coming 250th anniversary of the United States. I wanted something that would intersect our interests, and The Lost Girls of Paris ended up occupying a rather good place in the Venn diagram of our respective reading repertoire. It was also about the right length for the journey. Ours was a lightning visit to Washington, D.C., centered on celebrating the Fourth of July on the Mall and watching the fireworks, but we also managed to fit in the International Spy Museum. That proved an excellent accent to the book and the journey.

Listening to a book about women working behind enemy lines with my sister also proved particularly appropriate. We frequently paused the book so that I could ask questions and we could discuss the characters’ perspectives: why they behaved as they did, how they understood situations, and what was driving their decisions. My sister’s commentary became one of the best parts of listening to the book on the journey, and I came away with a better understanding of aspects of the story and the women’s perspectives that I probably would not have considered in the same way on my own.

This was not a five-star book for me, but it was a very pleasant read and almost exactly what we were looking for. We listened to most of it over the Fourth of July weekend. On the drive home, in the middle of the night somewhere in Ohio, some characters had been captured by the Gestapo, and things appeared to be heading somewhere rather horrible. At that darkest of hours, both in the book and in the night, I decided that I simply did not want to discover what happened next. That decision somehow became a pause of about a month and a half before I finally returned to the book, although my sister finished it promptly upon returning home. When I did, the ending was not nearly as bad as I had been anticipating.

I am glad I came back to it. It was well done, a good listen, and fit the trip beautifully. I probably would not read it again on my own, but I would gladly listen to something like it again with my sister.