The story starts off during the Cannes Film Festival, which is the height of glitz and glamour for the film industry. When struggling perfumer Sophie Duval shelters Miss Kelly in her boutique to fend off a persistent British press photographer, James Henderson, a bond is forged between the two women and sets in motion a chain of events that stretches across thirty years of friendship, love and tragedy. Their lives are changed forever by their chance encounter with Grace Kelly who is about to become a princess.
In Meet Me in Monaco, actress Grace Kelly serves as somewhat of a fairy godmother to both a young French perfumer and a British press photographer. It’s a similar style done well with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in The Editor by Steven Rowley and Queen Elizabeth II, or rather her dress, in The Gown by Jennifer Robson. However, the twist is that the famous person is not the main protagonist but rather a supporting character who is essential to the plot. Agent: Michelle Brower, Aevitas Creative Management.So I figured out my favorite kind of historical fiction book: when authors take a real-life figure and bring them back to life on the pages. Sweet, then bitter, then sweet again, the love story is woven through with Grace’s fairy-tale romance with Rainier and its devastating ending, snatching redemption from tragedy in the best Hollywood style. He is in love, yet constantly tugged homeward by ties to family and friends. Jim’s occasional reappearances warm Sophie’s heart but distract her from her goals. Sophie, meanwhile, must navigate the demands of her widowed, alcoholic mother and businessman boyfriend as she tries to parlay Grace’s patronage into new life for her business. His irate editor fires him anyway, freeing Jim to pursue the photos that interest him-and reconnect with the “intriguing” Frenchwoman who thwarted him. Grace gains sanctuary, Sophie gains an influential client, and Jim negotiates access to a photo op between Grace and Prince Rainier.
Visiting Cannes, he ignominiously fails to snap a red carpet photo of Grace Kelly while chasing down the elusive star, he follows her into the shop of 33-year-old Sophie Duval, a second-generation parfumeur, whose livelihood is on the brink. James Henderson, scrabbling by as a tabloid photographer in 1955 London, is 35, divorced, and uncertain in his parenting skills.
With glamour, perfume, and romance, Gaynor and Webb’s second collaborative novel (after Last Christmas in Paris) is a scrumptious concoction served up with delectable descriptions and heaps of emotion.
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