Claudine Fisher

A young woman named Judith, aka Carol or Carole, depending on her age and moods, finds her true love during the Second World War, moves from the windy city of Chicago to the Pacific Northwest where she settles as a married woman in a house among fir trees to pursue her teaching career.Meanwhile her husband creates a small bamboo grove in their back garden before his health condition worsens. As in an impressionist painting, touches after touches, we discover Carole's surprising destiny and what each of the three men in her life brings to her personality. Instead of evoking 19th century France and its colonies as in her trilogy of 'The Reluctant Paris Rebel, ' 'Southbound French Settlers' and 'The Breton Black Foot, ' Claudine Fisher sets her latest novel in the U.S., from 1938, through WWII, the 1980s' and 1990s', to modern day. In 'Call me Carole' the heroine remains connected to France thanks to her grandmother's roots, her French language teaching at the university, her wild imaginings and personal idiosyncrasies

The Breton Black-Foot, recounts how the child, Mathurin Gu gan, leaves Brittany and moves to Paris. As an adult participant of the 1848 Parisian Revolution, he decides to settle in Algeria. His seafaring captain grandfather was cod fishing in the waters of Newfoundland; his Acadian grandmother, caught in the French and Indian War or Great Upheaval as a girl, had to return to France via England; Mathurin's soldiering father fought in the Napoleonic wars. The ascendants' varied experiences act as counterpoints to the lives of Mathurin's descendants, Pieds-Noirs or Black-Foot French, during the chaotic war of independence for Algeria (1954-1962.) The Breton Blackfoot, being both prequel and sequel, ends the trilogy of Paris In Paris Out. In book 1, The Reluctant Paris Rebel, Mathurin Gu gan, experienced the 1848 revolution. Book 2, The Southbound French Settlers focused on Mathurin's voyage and his homesteading at the Castiglione colony, near Algiers. Book 3, The Breton Black-Foot evokes the good and bad times of mid-twentieth century Algiers, just before Moslems gained independence from France.

The Reluctant Paris Rebel takes place a few years after the French Revolution of 1830 and the barricades of 1832, described in 'Les Mis rables' by Victor Hugo. A guild crafstman, Mathurin Gu gan, dreams of a better life as he toils on a Paris cathedral and on the new chateau of Alexandre Dumas, author of 'The Three Musketeers.' He soon finds love with Marie-Rose, the cook to Marie Duplessis, the lady of the night and socialite of 'La Traviata' fame. Drama ensues and the new couple finds the course of their lives changed forever with the onset of the 'other, ' often forgotten, 1848 Revolution.