The Lollipop Shoes, Montmartre, Paris

The Lollipop Shoes delivers a thriller, wrapped in the shiny foil and sugar-dusted facade of a tale about a chocolate shop. For those who have read (or watched the film) Chocolat, this sequel catches up with Vianne Rocher and her
daughter Anouk now living in disguise in Montmartre, Paris.

The book opens on Halloween night with a woman who steals the identities of the dead. This time she has cast herself as Zozie de l’Alba, a suspiciously charming woman who sees in Anouk the simmering powers of a child on the edge of adulthood and rebellion. So the psychological war games begin.

Rich sensory detail could qualify as a Harris trademark – and the Lollipop Shoes contains lashings of it. But the heart of this story deals with mother-daughter relationships and the fear of losing a child.

Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.


The magic isn’t to my taste, but the story engages and the trip through confectionery and the narrow streets around the Sacré Coeur rewards like one of Vianne’s homemade truffles.

And the real Sacre Coeur

AS A TRAVEL GUIDE -

The Lollipop Shoes only shows Montmartre and – despite a few gritty comments –the district emerges as a fairytale land of blue tin signs, painted shutters and neat café-lined squares.

Enjoyable for nostalgia or for curling up with a mug of hot chocolate (though prepare to feel inadequate if, like me, yours involves powder from a sachet rather than vanilla and cardamon pods stirred on the stove.) Hardly gives you a realistic portrait of Paris as a whole.