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🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2

“In victory you deserve champagne. In defeat, you need it.” (Napoleon)

An engrossing and illuminating look at one of the most fascinating female entrepreneurs to grace the pages of history – Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot – who in the early eighteen hundreds, went on to build Veuve-Clicquot Champagne from its initiation as a pet project, run by her father-in-law (largely at a loss), to a two-hundred-thousand-bottle a year business.

Barbe-Nicole, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, is a woman out-of-place in the female-oppressive and war-torn historical context she is born into. Strong-willed, opinionated, picky and particular, convinced of her own mind and her ability to run with her own choices, Barbe-Nicole has been gifted (or cursed, according to prevailing opinions) with Le Nez – an incredibly acute sense of smell, passed down to her by her great grandfather, Nicolas Ruinart, the legendary founder of Ruinart, the oldest established Champagne house in France.

Told in first person POV in Barbe-Nicole’s voice, and based in Reims, France, this story, rich with historical detail, held me spell-bound. From her early teenage headstrong insistence that she would “only marry a suitor that smells like spring-time” through the passionate and tragic love story that followed, Barbe-Nicole’s unshakeable sense of her own self-worth, and belief in the path she ached to follow, though wobbly at first, is marvelous as it emerges and incredibly heartening in its tremulous development.

Without giving the plot away (no spoilers here, you will need to read the book), I loved pretty much everything about this story – the pacing, the character development, the informative historical underlay and the incredibly challenging but optimistic thematic messaging.

Highly recommended for readers of historical fiction, or pretty much anyone who enjoys strong female inspirational true-life heroes, this is a book I’m happy to have read, particularly in our current exhausting and terrifying global context (who isn’t feeling that right now?)

A great big thank you to the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

My stop today on the @Bookandwinelovers #blogtour for #ChampagneWidows written by #RebeccaRosenbergnovelist