Nicole-Marie Handy has a lifelong love of all things French, bu tat 56, had never been there. She is living a day by day mostly boring existence and having an affair with a married man who is a complete jerk. Everyone acts as though she shouldn't go to France on her own, and the jerk even proposes, bu t she decides to keep her promise to her friend, that she would go on without her after the friend died.

She has learned some French, and treasured a French dictionary that she found as a child and later had taken away from her, and has always been mistaken as being from Louisiana since she is African-American with French interests and French names. Her mother, Malvina, has always reacted badly to her interest in French and the photograph of a glamorous woman in their family photo album.

Nicole loves France as much as she thought she would. She is looking through a box at a junk shop and learning a bit about African Americans in France during and after WWII when she finds a picture of her father, Squire, from World War II with a loving message written on it to a woman she's never heard of.

Phone calls to her father do her no good as he has Alzheimer's and her mother, a strict and disciplined lady who's recovering from a stroke, isn't forthcoming. What Malvina does do, is send Nicole some letters written years ago, from Squire, Malvina, and a woman named Ruby. The revelations keep coming as she realizes her mother has never told her about her sister, Ruby.

As Nicole gets to know France and an interesting man from Senegal and learns more about the jazz scene in post WWII France she learns more about her family.

This was a great book with its French atmosphere, alternating between the present and Ruby's story in the past with her man Arnett, a jazz player. It also incorporates a love of poetry, especially Langston Hughes. One of Hughes' poems "Passing Love" gives the book its title. This book is a story about family secrets and getting to a certain point in your life and wondering how you got there. It might spark an interest in the lives of African Americans and the jazz scene in Paris in a time when African Americans were being accepted and celebrated there, when they weren't in the USA.

As a side note, the French words that introduced and hinted at the contents of each chapter were a nice touch.

I would recommend anyone interested in Paris, jazz, and African American history check out this book. ( )

Just finished Passing Love by Jacqueline E. Luckett. What a nice, easy read after The Orphan Master's Son -- I needed that :-) ( )

I absolutely adored this book! I’m a big fan of the Jazz Age and post~World War II African American culture, but those two topics are usually only covered within the confines of American society. Taking the concepts of racism, black womanhood, poverty and expectation across the Atlantic and intertwining it with romance, mystery, secrets and lies made for a delightful read.

This novel is part history lesson, part fantasy and a whole lot of “oh no she didn’t”. The sometimes antagonistic mother~daughter relationship is played out in a loving way that makes it relatable to women of all ages no matter what their relationships with their mothers. I also enjoyed the way Luckett handled the exploration of parents as people before they came together and created families. Did Mom or Dad really love someone before they met each other?

Overall, this is a terrific read and would make for some wonderfully creative book group discussions. ( )

Sometimes a place gets into your heart and head and you have no idea why. It just captures your imagination. It calls to you. It becomes the place you most want to visit in person. You just know you belong there in ways that are completely inexplicable. Paris is this sort of place for Nicole-Marie Handy in Jacqueline Luckett's novel Passing Love.

Nicole is at a turning point in her life. Her elderly parents are failing and she helps them out as best she can. Her married lover is proposing marriage but still seems to have no intention of actually leaving his current marriage. Nicole's best friend, with whom she had planned a trip to Paris to see the city that so captivates her, died of cancer. But she didn't die before extracting a promise from Nicole to take the much-needed trip anyway. A little distance from her life might give her some perspective on her road forward.

As Nicole wanders through Paris, learning to be a little bit spontaneous and to take a chance here or there, she makes some friends in the city. It is at the shop of one of these new acquaintances that she finds an old photograph of her father. The mystery of it and how it came to be between the pages of an old book in Paris takes over Nicole's thoughts and she embarks on a journey to discover this long buried part of her father's life knowing that she can't simply ask him, fogged in by Alzheimer's as he is.

Nicole's quest is not the only plot thread running through the novel though. Alternating from Nicole in present day Paris to Mississippi during WWII and then Paris after the war, the tale of RubyMae, a young black girl who escapes the Jim Crow South for the relative racial blindness of liberated Paris, also weaves through the narrative. These two parallel stories of women, one young and one in her fifties eventually come together but long before they do, it is clear that both tales are of women finding themselves, facing and making decisions that will forever impact their lives and who they are.

Each chapter, whether about Nicole or about RubyMae, starts with a small French lesson and some vocabulary words that foreshadow the story to come. The alternating between Nicole and RubyMae was initially confusing and felt a bit choppy but it eventually smoothed out. As can be the case, though, one story line was more interesting, more dramatic and so the reading experience was a bit lopsided. Thankfully, as the two stories started to come together, the whole strengthened but the connection was fairly predictable and the ending expected.

RubyMae started off as vibrant and passionately full of life but then the depth of feeling in her character faded unfortunately leaving her fairly flat. Nicole's character was flat for me all along. We're told her feelings and that she is driven to go to Paris, but that drive has to be taken on faith. Even her anger later in the book is described rather than expressed and while that fits in some ways with her suppressed character, it makes it hard to understand and sympathize with her. Finding the photo was a tad bit too deus ex machina for my taste but without it, there is no story.

The book does a nice job describing Paris now and then. And the portions about "black Paris," where all of the jazz musicians lived after the war, and how they lied and played was fascinating stuff. The book did a good job showing the opportunities and freedoms to be found overseas as compared to the US in the late forties and early fifties. Although simple and fairly predictable, folks interested in Paris after the war, the birth of jazz, and race relations in the Jim Crow era will probably find this a worthwhile read. ( )