The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

Brenda’s review

Lindsay and I read The Air You Breathe with four of our Traveling Sisters and we all really loved this glorious, rich and soulful story of friendship.

We all loved the vivid and colorful feel we got for the setting and lively time.  Frances de Pontes Peebles takes us through an intense and emotional, journey of a complex bond between friends and their love and ambition for Samba music.  We follow them through their path to fame.  We are taken to boozy Brazilian bars to the glamour of Hollywood.

Frances de Pontes Peebles does a great job here creating well developed unlikely and different characters with Dores and Graca.  The rich characters climbed into our hearts and we could feel their ambition, treachery, loss, excitement and could the price they paid for their ambition and fame.

We highly recommended this story to lovers of Historical fiction that enjoy a strong bond between friends and their passion for their love of music.

Lindsay’s review

This book will have you humming to the beat of samba music!
This is the story of Graca and Dores – two girls from two different parts of society. They have an intense friendship filled with fierce love and ruthless rivalry. They need and depend on each other in different ways, both feeling incomplete without the other.

The story begins on a sugar plantation in Brazil that Graca’s family owns. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of this part of the story. Dores is an orphan who has been ‘adopted’ by the head of the kitchen help. Outspoken, outgoing, spoiled Graca develops an immediate connection and bond with Dores and the two girls forge an unlikely friendship.

The girls’ journey takes them through their artistic careers and dreams of becoming samba stars – Graca the singer and Dores the songwriter. Many characters are introduced along the way, all the while, the samba music a sort of character in itself.

While I enjoyed this novel, I did find the story to be somewhat drawn out and riddled with too much detail. There were parts I found dragged and felt somewhat repetitive. However, I did enjoy learning about this time in history and felt the samba music was such a great background theme.

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