Schroeder, Lisa. My Secret Guide to Paris. New York: Scholastic Press, 2015.

I really, really want to go to Paris. I want to visit a bakery, walk through a museum, and maybe grab a fashion show! Lisa Schroeder creates a beautiful book for our middle schoolers about life, relationships, and well, Paris. Nora’s grandmother’s lovely stories about Paris have created in her the overwhelming desire to visit there. As they are in the midst of making plans to do so, her grandmother dies rather suddenly. As she is cleaning her grandmother’s apartment, she discovers seven letters, that she was to have opened in Paris and what looked to be a treasure map. She lobbies her mother to travel to Paris in spite of the loss of her grandmother, not an easy task as her mother and grandmother hadn’t even spoken in several years. Her persistence pays off when she, her mother, and brother set off to Paris, the journey of a lifetime. At first Nora hopes to explore the secrets in the envelopes all alone, but she quickly learns after a visit to a very special friend and a talk with someone there that she must have her mother with her to receive the gifts promised by her grandmother at each stop of the map. Again, Nora must be very persuasive to get her mother’s cooperation, but when she succeeds the results are well worth it. The two become much closer as Nora learns more about what separated her mother and grandmother. Nora’s mother learns to accept the forgiveness and new start that her own mother had intended to offer through this trip.

I can’t deny that for a moment I thought that maybe this book was just going to be a younger version of Johnson’s 13 Little Blue Envelopes. That feeling doesn’t last long at all as Nora begins her own, and very unique journey, through her grandmother’s Paris. I loved the development of the relationship between Nora and her mother. Seemingly, mothers and daughters can survive adolescence, get to know each other better, and in some respects be friends. I love the wisdom of the grandmother in wishing for Nora a much better relationship with her mother. In so many books of this genre, the parents disappear, and this book offers a refreshing change. I love that the romance in Paris is confined to Nora’s brother Justin. I don’t think the girls will even notice as they are caught up in the three women of Nora’s family that populate this novel and in the beautiful city of Paris. Schroeder gives us women who are not afraid to be who they are; who are not afraid to look at flaws and work to better themselves; who laugh and cry and learn together. Our girls need to meet these women. On a side note, I surely appreciate the Nora's librarian, who doesn't love a sympathetic, helpful librarian being portrayed in YA lit? Not this librarian!

I look forward to the start of school and a book talk on this title. I can pair it with Schroeder’s already very popular work in our library or with a series like The Mother Daughter Book Club. I love the positive messages that Schroeder communicates through engaging heroines and well developed plots. I can’t wait to get this one moving!