The Ambassador's Daughter
Fans of Kate Morton and Alyson Richman should reach for popular Jenoff’s latest historical romance. Naive German national Margot Rosenthal arrives in 1919 Paris prepared to play the dutiful daughter to her sweetly absentminded diplomat father as he attends a peace conference. Engaged to Stefan, a soldier wounded in the war, Margot holds fast to the flame of his love while trying to enjoy some brief freedoms before marriage. Instead, she discovers a Paris vibrant with people, parties, and unexpected complications as the simple reality she thought she knew morphs into a murkier place of secrets, betrayal, cunning, and lies. She meets intriguing musician Krysia Smok, a Polish woman who instantly takes Margot under her wing and introduces her to a less-sheltered worldview. Yet it’s when Margot meets Georg, a German naval officer, that her heart fiercely demands a life she hadn’t realized she was longing for. Framing Margot’s personal story with the larger scope of the early twentieth-century world, Jenoff (The Kommandant’s Girl, 2007) ably plumbs the concepts of courage, faith, and love against a dramatic backdrop. --Julie Trevelyan