The Paper Girl of Paris by Jordyn Taylor

Publisher: HarperTeen
Publication date:  May 26th 2020
Pages: 368

Sixteen year old Alice has just arrived in Paris with her family to spend the summer there. Her grandmother, who lived in Paris when she was young but moved to America later, has recently passed away and left Alice her apartment, in which nobody has been since her grandmother left it in the end of the 40's and has been locked for more then 70 years. But why is Alice the one to inherit the apartment, and why did her grandmother never mentioned it to her, or the fact that she had a sister she never mentioned? During her search for answers, this leads her to a diary of her grandmother sister Adalyn. Alice has seen a picture of her, on which it seems she is having a good time at a soiree with Nazi's. But when she digs deeper in the past, with the help of a French student named Paul which she meets in a true Parisian boulangerie, she finds out that things in the past happened different then they are pictured. In Adalyn's diary, she finds out that Adalyn was actally on the good side of the war and was working hard in the resistance, and the rest of her family was actually siding with the Nazi's.   When Adalyn meets Luc, leader of a resistance group on Paris, Adalyn feels she has some power to stop the war and help people, it does work out for her luckily to warn a few Jewish families on time so they can escape.

But keeping up the appearance of being a much-admired socialite while working to undermine the Nazis is more complicated than she could have imagined. As the war goes on, Adalyn finds herself having to make more and more compromises—to her safety, to her reputation, and to her relationships with the people she loves the most

Meanwhile Alice has to make choices too, does she keep the apartment, and how  can she help her mother, who has been spiraling down in a deep depression since her mother died, so that the whole family can make peace with the past??

The Paper Girl of Paris is a beautiful, well written, part historical, part temporary YA book. The story is outstanding and it was truly captivating to see the links between Alice's  link to the past of her grandmother and great-aunt Adalyn, with the city of Paris as a backdrop.It was very interesting to find out the mystery of her grandmother along with Alice and Adalyn, the book is alternating in chapters between the two of them, so from bot girls you get a real good point of views. While Alice is enjoying her time in Paris, things where quite different for Adalyn in scary, Nazi occupied Paris, especially dangerous when she became involved in the resistance, but no German was suspicious of her because she was a young girl. It was heartbreaking though when some guys from the resistance group, including Luc, go missing. It really kept you wondering and guessing if everything would turn out good or not for them in the end.

Anyhow, this is very good and entertaining read that I truly recommend reading!!