NB: This guest review is by Catherine Heloise! Previously, Catherine ranted about Shakespearean rockstars and loved Chase Me by Laura Florand. She also runs the Stories Under Paris website, which creates fictional stories based on the names of Paris Metro stations. How cool is that!

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A Crown of Bitter Orange is a sweet, gentle story, full of personal, family and regional history. It’s the third novel in Laura Florand’s La Vie en Roses series, and centres on the youngest of the Rosier cousins, Tristan. I have seen Tristan breezing through the background of the other Rosier cousins’ stories, and so I know already that he is the perfumer and artist of the family, the most charming and easygoing of the five cousins and, as is traditional, the best at winding up his older cousins – for their own good, of course.

The Rosier family is an old Provence family – local royalty of sorts, though they like to think of themselves as peasants – who have been growing roses, jasmine, and other aromatic flowers in Provence since the middle ages. More recently, the family – specifically the grandfather and adoptive great aunt of the cousins who are at the centre of this series – were key players in the local chapter of the French Resistance in the Second World War. While this might seem like a long time ago, this history and the feelings that go with it are still very much alive, not least for Malorie Monsard, whose great-grandfather betrayed three of the Rosiers’ friends to the Gestapo, and whose family has been in a downward spiral ever since.

Malorie is back in Grasse for the first long visit since she left as a teenager, and she is there to deal with her grandmother’s legacy – the Monsard perfume house that was so important to the region before the war, and which has been decaying since. Her grandmother had put the company to sleep, and it is up to Malorie to decide whether to let it lapse or wake it up again. This being Florand, there are a lot of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White references in the story, though if anything, the sleeping Princess is not Malorie, but the family perfume house, or perhaps the orchard.

Malorie herself is an accountant, and not just any accountant, but the one who ‘smashed Tristan’s life into pieces on the floor’ by insisting that his perfume, Fugace, was not economically viable unless he substituted some of his scents for less expensive sources, or even synthetics. The horror!

Fugace was beautiful. It could have changed the entire perfume industry. Changed the lives of people who wore it, changed the lives of people who met the people who wore it. And you sliced its heart out surgically and replaced it with a pig’s. To save money.

(Incidentally, one thing I like – and find hilarious – about Tristan is that he is so bitter and melodramatic about this – when he remembers to be. Which isn’t all that often, for a life-ruining experience, because Tristan lives in the moment and in his senses, is easily distracted, and is thus terrible at brooding. I do like a non-brooding hero.)

But there is more to Malorie and Tristan’s history than the ill-fated Fugace perfume. They are the same age, and went to school together from the age of five. Tristan suffers from something along the lines of ADHD, and just could not sit still or settle down in class, so his teachers always made him sit next to Malorie, the one child who would not be drawn into his distractions (this seems a little unfair on Malorie, to be honest – but also quite plausible). By the time they were in high school, Tristan had figured out for himself that he felt more focused around Malorie – she was so quiet and focused, a ‘cool green shaded place where you could just feel…safe…from all the barrage of sensations around you’, a refuge even – and he also had a massive crush on her, to which she was absolutely oblivious, despite nursing her own crush on him.

So there is a lot of history between them before this book begins.

(Speaking of history, one thing I rather liked was that Tristan really doesn’t understand how her family history, and especially her great-grandfather’s betrayal of the Resistance, affects Malorie. I mean, it all happened 70 years ago, right? Years before they were born! How can Malorie possibly be worried about it? But of course for him it has never had to matter – his grandparents were on the side of the heroes. It’s Malorie who has to contend with the region’s dislike and distrust of her family.)

Tristan does eventually figure out other strategies to deal with his ADHD, though he never falls out of love with Malorie. He figures out that he focuses best when he is doing something that engages his senses:

In fact, it wasn’t until he started working in perfumes, when everything he had to memorize had a sensation to it, a meaning, that he’d flourished. Scents could hold his brain together. If he could sink into them in his head, those scents carried all the activity and richness of life. Playing with them in his head felt like exploring the world, amassing sensations. He could focus on them.

Of course, Malorie’s calm and quiet and focus are not just a part of her nature – they are a result of, and a defense against, her father’s narcissism. We learn early on that he stole pieces of the family heritage to sell, and used charm to try to win his daughters over to his side and guilt-trip his wife into staying. Malorie is thus not inclined to trust charm, and Tristan is very charming. One thing I liked here is that Malorie knows, and acknowledges, from the very start, that Tristan is not like her father – Tristan basically wants the people around him to be happy and uses charm to achieve this goal. But that doesn’t stop her from reacting to seeing her father in him, even once their relationship is beginning to become established. This is not helped by the fact that Tristan, for all his crush on Malorie, makes some pretty stupid mistakes when it comes to Malorie’s inheritance.

I want to talk about Tristan for a bit, because he is really quite adorable. He is comfortable with himself, secure in his family’s affection, and has the sort of charm that calms people down and smooths ruffled feathers. He’s a genuinely sweet and kind person, who really likes everyone he meets. He is also playful and sensual and – befitting a perfumer – very focused on scent:

“Is it just orange blossom water?” Tristan said, back on her scent. “Is that what you use? I’d like to know who makes it, because it’s remarkably full. Almost fresh off the flower, with this hint of human honey in it.”

“Hint of human honey” might not make sense to anyone outside the perfume industry, but Malorie had spent her entire life surrounded by people who talked like that.

It was just…strange, in a way that tickled in inappropriate places in her body, to know that she herself was the hint of human honey.

“Farelli made me a one-off scent,” Malorie murmured, naming one of Tristan’s rivals, just to see what happened.

Tristan laughed. “Good one. He never made something that full of light in his life. But I could”– he grabbed her wrist and sniffed it again, this time the inside of it, completely forgetting the line she had just drawn in the sand about not doing that– “well, maybe…hmm.”

“Tristan.” She pulled her wrist back, and the calluses on the tips of his fingers grazed over her skin. “I am not a perfume touche.”

(I realise that this is a long quote, but it still doesn’t quite do Tristan justice – it’s a whole long conversation about something entirely different, where he keeps getting distracted by wait, what’s that smell on your wrist, I need to smell it again, why are you so weird about me sniffing your arm, if I buy you chocolate can I sniff your arm…?)

And while we are talking about Tristan’s fascination with scent, I’d like to pause here and note that Florand’s way of writing about perfumes is utterly fascinating:

The scent of dust a sparkle in the light. Dancing like it could float up into the sun. A deep rich floral base, gleaming under it like a fresh-finished parquet floor, an orange blossom with an age to it, as if it had been lying in wait, layered in and packed away, until someone opened a chest full of some great-great-grandmother’s wedding dress and the scent could release again…

Honestly, that description makes me want to weep, because smell is such an important and evocative sense for me, but I always find perfumes overwhelming – and yet I desperately want to try that one. Florand always makes her perfumes sound magical and it drives me right up the wall, because I can’t tell if this is magical realism or if some people really do experience perfumes like that and I’m just nose-blind or unsophisticated or something.

The story develops slowly, as is fitting with a relationship that has been developing, in one way or another, for over 25 years. As with all the Vie en Roses books, the Grasse region feels like another character in the book, its geography and history and valleys of flowers being both backdrop to and reflection of the story. One of the most beautiful things in this book is the overgrown orchard of bitter oranges that is part of Malorie’s inheritance. The description of the scent and harvesting of the orange flowers – and Tristan’s reaction when Malorie lets him into her garden (not a euphemism – though actually, yes, it turns out to be that as well) is sweet and evocative and utterly gorgeous.

Much of the conflict involves Malorie fighting her own demons, though Tristan certainly adds some by being far stupider than he needs to be, particularly since he has known Malorie long enough to have more sense than that. I found that a little frustrating, though entirely in character. I also got a little bit cross with him for dragging Malorie around to meet his grandfather and great aunt – the ones who most definitely do not have fond memories of her great-grandfather – without warning. Yes, he knows that they will warm to her, and yes, he is right about that, but it’s still a fairly obnoxious thing to do, and Malorie is right to call him on it. Despite his opinions on the subject, Tristan does not, necessarily, always know what is best for everyone.

I’d like to note, too, that this book feels in many ways like a mirror of the previous book, A Wish Upon Jasmine, in which moneyman Damien Rosier fell in love with perfumer Jasmin Bianchi. This time, the roles are reversed, and the perfumer is the one with the family backing and power; but Malorie still has quite a bit in common with Damien in how she views the world, as Tristan does with Jasmin. It feels like a mirror image in other ways, too – where Damien and Jasmin’s story was intense, very hot, and very focused on the present and recent past of the two main characters, Tristan and Malorie’s story is slow, sweet, full of history, and very full of family – because family and family history have shaped both Tristan and Malorie into the people they are, perhaps even more than these things shape most people.

I really liked A Crown of Bitter Orange. It’s sweet and soothing to read, and despite the conflict, I felt very safe reading it – for all the sniping early in the book, there is a sense of connection between Tristan and Malorie from the start, and I never doubted for a moment that Malorie and Tristan would be good for each other, once they finally got themselves sorted out. After all, underneath everything, they have known and loved each other since they were five, even if they weren’t always aware of it. They know where they come from, and what they value. It’s just a matter of sorting through their history until they come to the place where they can start their future.