something about how it was written made the prose strange to me, but it was a great storyline told from a different perspective: survival rather than resistance. page turner near the end ( )

In the village of Vergers, a small town on the Normandy coast of France, the hard work of fishing or farm life was offset by the comfort of sharing food and drink with family and friends. Emmanuelle (Emma for short) apprenticed to Ezra Kuchen. This village baker crafted his bakery creations for all to enjoy in their daily lives, and especially when celebrating special occasions, or comforting in times of loss and sadness. But the invasion of German troops changed everything. Like many, Emma didn't believe the Allies were coming to liberate them from occupation, atrocity, and treachery.

The lyrical writing is beautiful. Elegant in its simplicity yet collectively a masterpiece. It is a story of courage, bravery, persistence, resilience, kindness, and benevolence. All a reader’s senses are captured vividly, creating the imagining of delectable tastes of food and sips to drink, the smell of bread baking or a fresh catch from the sea, the sound of a rooster crowing to begin the day, or the splashing water against the fishing boats, or of boots clicking on pavement and the snap of a salute, the sights of the beauty of land and sea, or the sights of soldiers in every corner of their world, the warmth and touch of a loved one’s closeness and love, or the fear of forcible restraint and worse.

It is one of the most emotive reading experiences of WWII historical fiction that I have read. The bread is a metaphor natural to the joys of daily life to becoming horrific and humiliating when baking is compulsory for the enemy and withheld from villagers starving for food. One of many that led by example in WWII, Emma chose actions of the care and welfare of others before self, and was determined to find solutions to obstacles and treachery. I highly recommend the novel to every reader.

A Q&A with Stephen P. Kiernan and Emma and Reading Group Discussion Questions are available at the end of the novel.

This book was a gift from a reader friend, and I appreciate her introduction to this author. ( )

By June 1944, the German Occupation weighs heavily on the Norman coastal village of Vergers. The Germans confiscate whatever food the villagers grow or catch, deport men of working age to their armaments factories, and delight in summary executions. One person they shoot is Ezra Kuchen, the baker; the villager who takes his death the hardest is his assistant, Emmanuelle, known as Emma.

Emma would never dream of joining the Resistance, whose activity she blames for other losses, and who believes the Allies will never invade, so what’s the point? But willy-nilly, Emma becomes the prime mover in a complicated barter arrangement whose weblike strands encompass the whole village, and which the Germans would certainly call resistance.

Her treason centers around baking bread for the occupiers, which she cuts with enough straw to make extra loaves for neighbors in need. In each loaf, she carves a subtle V.

I like this part of the novel the best, and not only because of Emma’s ingenuity. Every fiber of her duplicity exists to satisfy someone else’s wants, which she at first resents, because they leave no room for her own.

But over time, she realizes that throwing herself into feeding others gives her a reason to live despite her pessimism, and keeps her from dwelling on her repressed desires, which would drive her mad. When someone tells her to have hope, she snaps, “Can that be eaten? What does it taste like?” But since the novel opens on June 5, 1944, the reader knows what’s coming before she does.

Having written about military occupations and traveled Normandy, I was looking forward to The Baker’s Secret. (My fondest memory of the many French walking trails I’ve followed is of Calvados, where a group of local hikers pressed wine and food on me and told me how grateful they felt to Americans for having liberated them.) I gobbled up this confection of a novel in just about one sitting, which says something about its excellent pacing, but I felt hungry soon afterward. The story pleases, but, except for Emma, the characters have no depth, and the fable-like tone makes it hard to tell whether to take the narrative’s real tragedies seriously.

One weak link is the German soldiery. Kiernan’s occupiers deal out plenty of brutality, but they’re stiff, utterly predictable marionettes who act like no soldiers I’ve ever read of or seen, let alone like the Wehrmacht. They are easily fooled, spout racial and political prejudices like windup toys, seem not to understand their own weaponry, and even invite Emma to a place where she can see their fortifications, which they then boast of to her. They’re not buffoons, exactly; more like a collection of bumbling neurotics with guns.

Just as the Germans are unreal enemies, the villagers are improbable, idealized good guys. They’re more like a foreigner’s idea of what French people must be like, with generic, styled modes of expression, attitudes, and descriptions.

For starters, I don’t believe that Vergers has a Jewish baker, that Ezra Kuchen is Jewish, or that the villagers would honor him in death so fervently. He’s a cliché, a blatant device, and, incidentally, the only villager to possess a last name, whose meaning (“cake”) is no subtler than anything else in this story.

Kiernan tries hard to evoke Emma’s fear that someone in Vergers will betray her, but you know they won’t; they’re too righteous. Over time, a candidate presents himself, but he’s so roundly detested that you expect his duplicity rather than fear it.

I appreciate Kiernan’s attempt to show the cruelties perpetrated during the Occupation, and to portray the violence of the invasion as a decidedly mixed blessing for the people of Normandy. But The Baker’s Secret, though it has its poignant moments, teeters between cartoonish fable and skewed reality. ( )

Not a book club book. Well written ( )

Loved it ( )