Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan ~ my review

Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Liam Callanan’s novel, Paris by the Book, shows how grief plays out in Leah, and daughters, when her husband Robert mysteriously disappears. The story is well-told, at least judging by the level of angst I felt as I read. Is Robert alive? He must be dead. No, certainly he’s alive. No trace of him; he’s dead. But I can’t believe he died. I sense his presence in their neighborhood; they were a happy family—he wouldn’t just leave them—he’s in the ’hood, I feel it. On and on my speculations see-sawed, until I almost abandoned the book. Partly because it seemed the reveal would never come.

And partly because the tension of not knowing was too much to bear. In this aspect, I had more empathy with Leah’s sometimes-erratic behavior than I might have otherwise. I really did not like Leah as a person, but I was rooting for her to come out the other side of her confused emotions. Regardless of my level of affinity or empathy for Leah, however, I think I would have admired her courage to move from Milwaukee to Paris with two teenage daughters and prosper there. Experiencing Paris with this little family of expats and following them in all the plot twists and turns and ups, downs, and corkscrews of their search for Robert was an interesting emotional roller coaster for me. Not often do I use “interesting” to describe a roller coaster. :-)

In some ways this was a hard book to read because of the grief screaming from every page. Also, I had difficulty discerning if Leah and her daughters were living out a story Robert had written for them or not; while my ever-present confusion may have put me in Leah’s shoes, it also made the novel hard to read. But Paris by the Book was also easy to read, a page-turner mystery, happy-sad love story with humorous bits, and vicarious immersion into French culture.




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