Le Tour de Love

Sweet slow-burn and a very beautiful romance. This is the type of romance I love to read. Chick-lit romance is the best romance, and honestly speaking, I loved it since 2013. This story will take its readers to the amazing journey of love. I really enjoyed reading the journey of Molly and Alex in finding love.

I just got back from my mini-Europe vacation trip a week ago and the fact that this story took place in Paris and it was my first time going to Paris during my Europe trip, it makes me really want to read this book because well…honestly speaking, I had high expectation of Paris but when I was there, it was a huge letdown and I didn’t enjoyed my time there. So by reading this book, it makes me enjoyed and loved Paris, even though this story is wholly fictional.

As much as this story focused on cycling, it also doesn’t take away the romance that the story has been focusing on since the beginning. I was so nervous that the romance will be taken away from the story since the cycling part is a huge thing in the story, but I was glad to know that the author doesn’t forget the romance between Molly and Alex and that the cycling part is just a way for the author to put Molly and Alex together in a slow-burn way. I have never seen any romance authors do that before but Lilac Mills surely know what she’s doing and she did it in a very clever way.

I called Molly and Alex’s first meeting as fate. As a reader myself, I can tell that something will happen between the two of them and fate brought them together in the end. Molly was there to check on Alex because he was her patient at first and when he offered her a job to take part in the Le Tour de France (a big cycling tour), she took the opportunity and hope to discover and explore Paris. But when that happen, it wasn’t like what she expected.

Their relationship is the purest and the most beautiful relationship, the author didn’t rush in making these two become a couple, instead she made a slow process in building up Molly and Alex’s relationship which ended up in them having a sweet and beautiful relationship. I truly loved it when authors doesn’t rush their characters into having a relationship but building it up properly before they throw their characters into the serious dating world.

The way Lilac wrote the build up of Molly and Alex’s relationship was very smooth and clean. It started with Molly and Alex being good strangers then later on give the two of them a stable and great friendship and then slowly turned it into the two of them developing feelings to one another and then putting a lot of challenges in the middle as in to test them whether they can stand it or not, then finally putting them together and giving them their happy ending. The whole long process was worth waiting for. The ending was truly epic and pure happiness, I was crying tears of joy.

This type of story might look like it ran smoothly from the beginning til the end, but actually no! It does have lots of great challenges that Molly and Alex had to go through. Being in the same team as Alex, Molly got a warning from some of Alex’s teammates about staff and a cyclist having a relationship. It was forbidden because Alex’s manager doesn’t want Molly to be a distraction to Alex since he is a professional cyclist and on his way to win a big competition and make his own name. I was sad that Molly had to face such thing, but she is a brave young woman with a tough heart. She has been so supportive of Alex and she is his greatest motivation. Her existence alone makes Alex determined to win the race and she helped in motivating him a lot. She took care of him while he was still hurting because of his injury, but her presence makes him fight the hardest to win. These two are so compatible together.

By reading this book also taught me a lot of things about cycling and what it was like to be a professional cyclist like Alex, and what kind of race a cyclist had to face when competing in a big competition like the Le Tour de France. When Molly was describing every single thing about the mountains that the cyclists had to go through and how a cyclist can get seriously injured if they make a mistake, I was scared and couldn’t even imagined all the things that the actual cyclists in real life had to go through. There’s a lot of tough challenges being a professional cyclist and no wonder competing in a cycling competition is very dangerous.

Apart from the whole cycling thing, I also get to see Molly experiencing Paris, and even with her limited time exploring Paris, at least she get to visit all the amazing places in Paris that I didn’t have the time to go to (because I didn’t stay longer there and my time was also limited in Paris). Molly didn’t have much time to go for a sightseeing, but being with Alex was already enough for her and it was truly her best moments there because she get to spend it with the man that she loved and it was also the city where they found love in one another. No wonder many people said that Paris is the city of love, and I only get to see it from Molly’s POV because from my actual experience in Paris, it’s not as beautiful as I hoped for and to me, Venice is the real city of love and not Paris.

To me, the meaning of ‘city of love’ is not the city where people find the love of their life or just find love in general, to me the meaning of ‘city of love’ is how beautiful the city is (like majestically beautiful), and how truly in love we are with the city to the point where we just want to move to that city and start a new life because that city showed us the true meaning of love and it also showed us that we can call it our home and that we can have more than just one home. It is also the city that we had the hardest time saying goodbye to because our heart already belongs to that city and we’re not ready to leave it. And I didn’t feel it with Paris, but I feel it with Venice the most. That’s just how I see it, everyone has different view when it comes to the meaning of ‘city of love.’

Sorry for my random rant, I was just stating what I truly felt. I know it’s not needed, but it just happened and I couldn’t stop myself. Aside from that, I truly enjoyed reading this story and get to see Molly and Alex’s journey of finding love together. It was a well-crafted story featuring so many amazing characters and it was a beautiful romance, one that I would never get tired of rereading it. I was hoping to get more of Molly and Alex, but that ending was already perfect and the author did a great job writing it.

You know a story is great when…you read it from start to finish in one go. That’s how much I loved this sweet romance set against the backdrop of the Tour de France cycle race.
Molly is a physiotherapist who grabs “the opportunity of a lifetime” to work for a professional cycling team and see a bit of France at the same time. Pro cyclist Alex has defied all odds to recover from injury. Now, he gets to realise his dream of participating in arguably the best cycle race on the planet. Neither of them could have foreseen how much the trip would change their lives.
If you enjoy heart-warming romances set in exotic locations, then this story is for you. The author did a fantastic job to help me traverse France through the eyes of the characters. Yes, the plot steers into an unlikely outcome at the end – but, hey, why not? It is a fictional story after all, and a very satisfying one. An absolute Tour de Love and pure, wholesome fun!
This was the first novel by this author that I read and I’m ready for more.

My Rating:

3.5

My Review:

While I’m not unhappy with the book, it just wasn’t what I had anticipated. This was a slowly developing story featuring an English cyclist in the Tour de France bike race, while I was expecting a romance. There was a working relationship between the pair and a quiet and largely unspoken attraction involving the cyclist and a staff member that consisted of eyeballing and preoccupations and finally a little bit of kissing, but a romance was forbidden due to their working relationship.

I learned a lot about the French countryside as well as professional cycling as I had no idea this was a team event rather than an individual sport. The writing style was pleasant and easy to follow although the elements of the storylines began to feel overly familiar and repetitious as Molly repeatedly debated her issues of attraction for a man she couldn’t engage due to the rules of her employment. The characters were likable and their relationship was sweet, respectful, and chaste enough for my elderly mother’s book club.

I did glean a few interesting additions to my Brit word and idioms list with dunny – which could be excrement or a toilet, strewth – a mild oath of surprise, sold a pup – swindled or tricked into buying, and damp squib – an anticlimactic event that did not live up to expectations.