Ellen Sussman (1) (1954–)

I took seven years of French and spent some of the summer after my senior year in high school in France. My daughter wants to take French as her foreign language when she gets to high school. We definitely find a mystique about France, the French, and Paris in particular. If I ever get there again, I want to walk through the city with a French tutor at my side and completely immerse myself in the Paris experience. In the meantime, I can read books about this fabled city.

Opening with an show more introduction to three French tutors and their complicated personal lives, the book is followed by three distinct stories and then a final chapter on the tutors. This structure allows Sussman to examine love in many different aspects and at various stages: beginning, disappointed, forbidden, waning, and steadily constant. Nico, a poet who has just discovered that he is going to be published, is in love with fellow tutor Chantal, holding the memory of their night together close to him. But Chantal is with Philippe, a handsome but morally casual fellow tutor, and her evening with Nico was a bid for attention or revenge or something from Philippe. Tangled as their lives are, these three French language tutors are about to meet up with three very different Americans and the emotional baggage they have lugged to Paris.

Nico is assigned to Josie, a high school French teacher who has come to Paris grieving and newly pregnant. She was supposed to come to the city with her married lover but she is unexpectedly alone and finding it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. As she and Nico wander Paris together, working on her conversation, he becomes acutely attuned to her fragile emotions, supporting her as she faces the death of love and the uncertainty of her future. Their easy, flirtatious, and comforting banter allows for the emotionally charged revelation of her affair and its terrible end. Her pain teaches Nico even as she learns from it herself.

Philippe has a standing tutoring session with Riley, an American ex-pat struggling with her situation and floundering in her marriage. She has two small children, one of whom is an infant, and an emotionally unavailable husband. She cannot find anything positive in her life in Paris, feeling alone and friendless. For a change, she and Philippe go out into the city instead of their usual lesson in her home and because of Riley's low mastery of French, they remain isolated from each other, conversing at cross-purposes and without complete understanding. Riley exists fully only to herself, continuing only to be one of many women in Philippe's orbit and even as she realizes that this is the way in which she has come to live her entire life in Paris, she does not fight against it, simply acquiescing, loveless and resigned.

Chantal is on the final day of her walking tour tutoring session with Jeremy, the husband of an international film star in Paris on location for a movie. He has tagged along with wife Diana but is an outsider to the film world and so has stayed occupied by taking these lessons, building his confidence in the spoken langauge. He finds that he is attracted to his beautiful tutor but as he fantasizes about her, he also knows that what he has with his wife is special. As Jeremy learns that a steady, comfortable kind of love is not one to forsake, Chantal has her own revelations.

Sensual and intriguing, the novel takes place over the course of only one day in Paris. It is tied togther both by the French tutors but also by the presence of the movie being filmed in Paris, with each of the characters seeing in the day's movie scene a reflection of themselves and of the day they've had. There is graphic sex, some jarring and discordant, but in many ways that is its function in the story. There is loss and longing woven throughout the connected stories but there is also love, residual, real, and undying. The writing is flowing and easy and I absolutely devoured the story in one sitting. Sussman has captured Paris and its feel beautifully here and has created wonderfully human characters who experience a full range of emotions, involving the reader and pushing her to think and reflect on this messy life and our relationships within it. show less

Ellen Sussman’s French Lessons was . . . eh, fine. Though her writing is lyrical, I got to know her characters in such a limited, superficial way that no one person has stuck with me. Weeks after finishing, I had to physically open the book to remember anyone’s name. That doesn’t bode well. I never thought a book about sex — and make no mistake: this one oozes with trysts, sensuality and attraction — could be so dull.

Nico was probably my favorite character, but only because he was show more the one person I got to know. His love for Chantal, a fellow Parisian and tutor, was touching at times — and I did like the book’s conclusion. But everyone else was either selfish and dull or ridiculous and campy. I hated and felt no empathy for Josie, a grief-stricken teacher dealing with the death of her married (and not to her, natch) lover. If anything, I only felt sharp twinges of anger toward her.

But those were fleeting. I waited for French Lessons to make me feel something, especially since I’m caught up in a tailwind of obsession with Paris at the moment. But in the end, all I felt was a listless desire for this book to be over.

The book’s one strength is the gorgeous portrayal of Paris, a character unto itself. I could feel the breeze ruffling my hair from atop the Eiffel Tower and taste the warm goodness of a croissant while seated at a French cafe. In Sussman’s hands, the city becomes the glittering and glamorous array I imagine it to be. It’s the characters — the human characters — that leave much to be desired.

I did finish French Lessons, though. And I have no problem tossing books aside, so I give it points for that. But unless you’re a diehard francophile, I would probably head for more alluring pastures. show less

There's that old cliche about getting right back up on the horse after you fall off and surprisingly, it really does work on many things. But could you do it when the thing that you need to overcome is not small but truly horrible and terrifying, not just something you've built up to be scary in your own mind? What kind of bravery would it take then? For the main character in Ellen Sussman's novel The Paradise Guest House, the things she has to face are awful, shattering and beyond the show more normal ken but she is determined to face the demons that continue to haunt her and to heal.


Jamie Hyde is guide for an adventure travel company out of San Francisco. She climbs mountains, shoots rapids, and goes wherever traveling adreneline junkies want to be. She has few emotional ties aside from her dying boss, best friend Larson and she actively avoids the entanglements of heart and hearth. She was in Bali researching potential trips for the company when her world exploded in the blink of an eye in the 2002 nightclub bombings. As a survivor, her body has healed but she is still filled with guilt and grief and horror about the events of that terrible night. So just one year later, she is back in Bali for a healing ceremony arranged for both survivors and victims' families. She's come to not only face the horrors of that night, as she has explained to everyone who has asked, but also on a more private quest to find the stranger who saved her life and whom she cannot get out of her mind.


Jamie's host in Bali at the Paradise Guest House is Nyoman, a gentle Balinese man whose wife was a waitress at one of the clubs. If anyone can understand some of her sorrow and pain, he can. As Bali and the people there work to ease her guilt and grief, she starts her search for Gabe, an American ex-pat living in Bali after his own personal tragedy, the man who saved her life that fateful night but who she has only the scantest of information on: first name and occupation. What Jamie's final outcome will be, if she will find acceptance and make peace with what happened both in the nightclub that night and with Gabe in the aftermath of the bombing, will depend greatly on his reception of her and on her ability to forgive herself. Jamie is on a journey, courageous and struggling, but her strength of spirit shines through, even despite her guilt and deep sadness.


The novel starts in 2003 but moves back to 2002 and the bombing and its immediate aftermath, before coming back to 2003 and Jamie's emotional quest. This allows the additional reasons behind Jamie's survivor's guilt over the bombing to be revealed slowly and effectively to the reader. It also allows the reader to get a sense of Gabe's motives for rushing into the burning building to save as many as he can before it collapses completely. And it explains why these two souls, so hurt and damaged even before the bombings, would cling to each other as to life rafts in the face of a world seemingly rent asunder in those days immediately following the arrival of terror on an island previously known for its paradise.


Sussman has written a beautiful travel novel, a gentle romance, and a quiet homage to the innocent place where a terrible event rocked the world. Touching on not only the famed beauty and spirituality of Bali, Sussman has also drawn a lovely picture of the people who live there, from Nyoman, grieving his wife and unborn child; to wily street child Bambang and his loyal dog; from Dewi, Nyoman's rebellious yet endearing niece; to Wayan, the local doctor who treated her after the bombing and who feels righteous anger over the second class treatment of the Balinese injured. She's portrayed the culture as welcoming and thoughtful, anxious for healing and moving forward. Jamie as a main character was complex and her baby steps toward opening herself up to the possibility of living and loving made her very appealing to read about. Gabe was a sympathetic character as well and together their confusion and hurt over the past as they explored their needs for the future, together or separately, was well handled. Their bonding after the nightmare quality of what they experienced together was understandable and very emotional but their connection the following year was perhaps a bit rushed. In the end though, the search for connection and the opening up to love and life was done beautifully and respectfully and the end of the story was spot on. The book was touching, serene, and a pleasure to read. show less

I just picked up this book today and read it in about two hours. It's a quick read, and enjoyable.

The scene of Paris is set very well, I felt like I could be walking through the streets myself. I don't know if I will ever go to Paris. I'd like to hope so, but if not, then this book did a good job of giving me a brief, inviting glimpse.

There's a lot of sex in this book, but it's written about tastefully. It's a nice mix of rough and raw, and emotional.

I did have a hard time feeling for show more Josie, the woman who has an affair and loses her lover to a plane crash. She seemed to child like for me to really feel for her. From her converse shoes to the fact that her lover is only ten years younger than her father. She just hasn't quite grown up yet. Maybe the fact that she's pregnant with his child will change that, but we don't know much about what happens to her as she runs away from Nico instead of running away with him.

Riley, I felt a lot for. Her marriage is crumbling and she's in Paris while her husband works his business meetings and she stays home with her two children. Her two year old knows more French than she does and she has done about all she can to avoid really exploring Paris She has a sordid fling with her French teacher Phillipe.

She mentioned pain au chocolat so many times though that now I really want some. I've turned into a baker in recent months but have no desire to spend the time that I imagine it takes to make pain au chocolat, and no clue where to buy some.

I liked Jeremy's story too. His was more of a flirtation with Chantal, (though there were undertones of desire) but he is content, and passionate about his life.

The interweave of these characters with their tutors is well done. There were a lot of characters but they were all relevant to one another and not insanely confusing like A Visit from the Goon Squad (Obviously I still have not come to like that book)

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