A couple of months ago, I finished editing Paulita Kincer’s recent novel Falling for Provence. As I sent my final edits to her, it occurred to me that I was uniquely suited to be her editor, since most of her books are set in France and intertwine with French culture. In a strange, circuitous way, Paulita benefits from an “injustice” I suffered at the hands of Ohio Wesleyan’s English Department when I entered that school as a freshman in the fall of 1967. Shortly after arriving on campus, I and most other freshmen took a writing test to see if we were proficient enough to be excused from taking a basic preliminary English course. I don’t remember the specific prompts that were on the test, although they were based in part on some books we were supposed to read before coming to campus.  Unfortunately, although I read the required books, I did not pass this test and thus had to take the basic course.

I never received any feedback on what I did wrong. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because I was too mad to care. Mad? More like enraged, livid, apoplectic. Throughout high school, I routinely earned A’s and B’s in English, and did particularly well on essay questions. To be told I needed to take a time-wasting, semi-remedial basic English course was insulting and ego-deflating. Still, there was nothing to do but grit my teeth and get through English A, as it was called. This I did with a minimum of effort, but when the course was over, I resolved to never take another English course at Ohio Wesleyan again. The problem was I needed to have 10 literature credit hours to graduate. Most of my classmates chose to fulfill that requirement in English literature, but there were other choices, specifically French, Spanish, German, and Russian. (The Classics — Greek and Latin — might also have been a choice.)

Choosing French came easily for me. I had taken four years in high school and had done fairly well, earning mostly B’s with an occasional C being offset by an occasional A. So instead of reading poetry by Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, I read poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Lamartine; instead of immersing myself in novels by Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, I wrapped my head around books (or excerpts thereof) by Francois Rabelais and Honore Balzac.  As I read French literature, I also became acquainted with French culture, geography, and history. I learned about the paintings at the Louvre, key figures in the French Revolution, and the philosophy of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In my senior year, I audited an advanced class in French literature. It was tough. With help from a French-English dictionary, I tackled Camus’ La Peste (The Plague) and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir (The Red and the Black). But Marcel Proust bewildered me. Even English translations of Proust’s work are not easy to figure out. There were moments when I wondered if I should let go of my resentment and take an English course, but in the end, I never regretted gaining my literature credits in French.

Fast forward to 2012 when my Columbus State colleague Paulita Kincer asked me to do a final edit of her soon-to-be published novel The Summer of France (Oblique Press). I readily agreed. Paulita’s book revolved around Fia Randolph, an attractive woman nearing 40, who gets more than she bargained for when she, her husband, and two teenage children travel to France to manage her aunt and uncle’s bed and breakfast in Aix en Provence. Because Paulita is a fine writer, there wasn’t much I had to revise in the way of grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. For that reason, I had a good opportunity to enjoy the story itself. I found that the knowledge I gained about French language and culture from my college coursework made it easy to understand the French phrases she used as well as references to French customs and cuisine.

In the years that followed, I edited a number of other books Paulita wrote, including three set at least partly in France. The most-recent of these, Falling for Provence, brings Fia back into the picture along with her Uncle Martin and Aunt Lucie and their charming B&B, Le Beau Horizon. Fia, now estranged from her husband Grayson, has a lot on her plate. Besides helping manage the B&B, she must keep tabs on her sometimes-difficult teenage twins, West and Kasey, and accommodate her self-centered mother, who arrives unexpectedly at Le Beau Horizon after leaving Fia’s father.  Then there’s her romantic relationship with Christophe, an art expert at the Louvre, which blossomed toward the end of The Summer of France. Christophe has family problems of his own that began when he turned away from his father’s dealings in black market artwork. All the while, Fia longs for the companionship of another woman — possibly one from the local community — who can empathize with her problems and offer support.

Into this mix comes a mysterious visitor to Le Beau Horizon. Ali Jaffari claims to be a professor of Mesopotamian studies who’s arrived in Provence to give some lectures — but from the outset it’s clear he has other intentions. Is he plotting a terrorist attack or have other sinister plans? Christophe fears he might, and after initially having some romantic feelings toward Ali, Fia begins to wonder if Christophe is right. Their suspicions about Ali prompt Fia and Christophe to follow him to Paris and eventually to the Louvre where the intrigue reaches a climax. At the heart of the story is a compelling question that has generated considerable controversy: Do art treasures from ancient civilizations belong to the modern nations where those treasures originated, or do they belong to the nations whose archaeologists found the treasures and brought them to light?

Even more than when editing The Summer of France, my knowledge of French history and culture served me well when editing Falling for Provence, given its references to historic figures such Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XVIII as well as celebrated sites such as Tuileries Gardens, La Place de Bastille, and Les Invalides. There’s even mention of the tragic fire that almost destroyed the Cathedral at Notre Dame. At times, I feel Paulita’s narrative has a few more words than necessary, but Falling for Provence is a solid 4-and-1/2 star novel. If you enjoy history, romance, intrigue, and suspense, you are likely to enjoy this book — even if you never took a college course in French literature.

Falling for Provence is available for purchase as an eBook and paperback from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Falling-Provence-New-Life-Book-ebook/dp/B089HJBR17.