Paris By the Book

Leah Eady has relocated to Paris with her two teenage daughters in the wake of her husband's disappearance, in which a complete lack of evidence leaves Leah and her daughters completely in limbo as to whether he left them or has died. All Leah is left with is an incomplete manuscript from her husband that seems to foreshadow the life she has chosen to lead in Paris, running an English-language book store. However, when Leah and her daughters start to feel like they're seeing her husband around the city, they all must grapple with whether he's there or if grief is causing them to see phantoms of a man who is no longer there.

Callanan has written a beautiful book that evokes the world and emotional life of Leah so very well, while also show more crafting a compelling plot that pulls the reader along. I went into reading this book having completely forgotten what it was about and why I had put it on The List and so the narrative was a surprise and a delight to me. Callanan describes Paris beautifully and in a way that will make readers long to visit or to return to the City of Lights. While some of the supporting characters feel a bit less fleshed out than Leah, Callanan's real focus is exploring Leah's internal emotional life and how she deals with being the one left behind and not knowing the fate of her husband. Recommended for readers who enjoy literary fiction with a bibliophile flavour. show less

The elevator pitch for this book must have been a Paris-smitten bibliophile’s dream book: an author vanishes leaving behind a wife and two adolescent daughters who find a clue that he might be in Paris, follow him there, end up staying, buy a bookstore, and continually scan the Paris streets for him. It’s a mystery, a love story, a love affair with Paris, and an emotional exploration of loss and remembrance. It’s one part Bemelman (author of the Madeline stories), one part Lamorisse (writer/director of The Red Balloon) and one part Modiano. It sounds incredibly enticing. And there are moments — more than just moments, to be fair — in which the mélange becomes something altogether new and a bit wonderful. Alas, there is also show more the difficult problem of going from elevator pitch to full-length novel. The huge leaps the reader is asked to take, the implausibility of some situations, the plot holes, and the tricksy business of 21st century passports and identity tracking, which make the reading at times a bit of a slog. Nonetheless, I think most lovers of Paris will still say they enjoyed the book. Just thinking yourself into Paris page after page is probably enough.

And so, gently recommended for lovers of Paris only. show less

An interesting but ultimately frustrating book, because although you develop a close understanding of the protagonist, sympathize with her going to Paris because her husband has disappeared, and feel for her kids and friends, the bumps that occur just didn't hit home with me. It was as if everything happened twice: a crisis with the kids (illness in one case, lost twins in another), her husband leaving, her ups and downs about whether to believe or have her kids believe he's alive or dead, connections with her friend Eleanor, the book Madeline/the movie The Red Balloon. All intriguing in their own way but the conclusion just didn't ring true. A story of growth and acceptance, with fun glimpses of Paris, it could have taken place at any show more time or place. show less

Like a lot of other avid readers, I can’t resist at least taking a look at any book whose title includes the words “book” or “bookstore.” Sometimes even the word “library” does the trick. But as many times as not, I find that the plot doesn’t really interest me enough to read them, or I do read them and end up wishing I hadn’t. I’m happy to report that neither of those things happened with Liam Callanan’s 2018 novel Paris by the Book. This one, about an American woman and her two daughters who buy a failing Paris bookstore pushed all the right buttons, but there’s a lot more going on here than button-pushing.

Leah Eady’s husband Robert writes children books, just not as many as he used to write. And these days show more Robert is taking way more writer’s breaks than he used to take, breaks during which he disappears from home for two or three days at a time. Robert uses the time to hole up in some quiet spot where he labors to turn out a more few pages toward his next book. Leah may not particularly like the idea, but by now she’s used to it. So when Robert disappears again she is not all that concerned at first; that comes later, after her husband has been missing for an entire week.

Before he leaves, Robert often leaves little notes for his wife and daughters to find, but this time there’s nothing there – at least it seems that way. But then Leah uncovers tickets to Paris for herself and her daughters, and she wonders if the tickets might somehow be tied to Robert’s absence. She decides to take her children to Paris to see if they might find Robert there waiting for them – but he isn’t. What turns up instead is a partially completed novel that Robert has apparently been working on without her knowledge, a story set in a Paris bookstore owned by a family that sounds very much like hers. A close study of the partial manuscript leads Leah and her two girls to a small failing bookstore very much like the one in Robert’s story, so when the bookstore owner offers to sell the store to Leah she does what she thinks her husband wants her to do: she buys it. But where is he?

Paris by the Book is all about a damaged American family in Paris, one searching desperately to find the missing piece that will make it whole again. Leah and her two girls settle into their new lives nicely, but all three of them feel as if Robert is out there somewhere watching them do it. The girls go to school and make new friends, and Leah, despite herself, is starting to feel as if she were single again. As the months go by, she begins to wonder if Robert could be dead, but she is not sure she really wants to know the truth. Perhaps that truth, whatever it is, would be even harder on the family than believing that he would walk through their bookstore’s door one day to tell them he was back.

One of the things that most surprised me about Paris by the Book is how much I learned from it about Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline series of children’s books and about Leah’s all-time favorite book, one by Albert Lamorisse called The Red Balloon. Ellie and Daphne share their mother’s love of The Red Balloon and are thrilled to be living in the very Parisian neighborhood in which the book is set. These girls are definitely book people, so living above a bookstore is their idea of heaven. Leah explains her girls this way:

“I have strange children. Or the world wanted me to think that way, at least when we lived in Wisconsin: my girls grew up loving to read. True, they liked milk, understood football, and were as bewitched by screens – TV screens, movie screens, and most definitely phone screens – as everyone else. But they were strange in that they loved reading above all else.”

Bottom Line: Paris by the Book is a booklover’s dream. It features a weird little English-language bookstore in the heart of Paris and some of the world’s favorite children’s books. It’s about solving the mystery of a missing man who walked away from his family one morning without saying goodbye and hasn’t been seen since. It’s about the streets of Paris and what happens in the city’s little neighborhoods after all the tourists have called it a day. And most importantly, it’s about books and how loving them can sometimes change a family’s life for the better. show less

Leah and Robert’s relationship is formed through literary connections, specifically two French children’s works: Madeline, and The Red Balloon. Leah has always wanted to visit Paris and Robert, a struggling writer, promises they will someday. They marry, have two daughters, and settle into a fairly typical American suburban lifestyle. But their relationship begins to fracture when Robert’s career stalls, and one day he just disappears, seemingly without a trace. Even as the family is trying to figure out what happened, they discover he left behind airline tickets for Leah and their children. Was this a hint? Could he have gone to Paris? They decide to make the trip and see what they find. After a few missteps they end up living in show more and operating a once-profitable Paris bookshop, but they never stop looking for Robert and hoping he will re-enter their lives.

On one level, this works. Literary references abound, the wonders of Paris come through on the printed page, and the struggle to adjust to a new country is portrayed well. But: this is a family dealing with unresolved loss. While Robert’s spirit was nearly omnipresent, Leah and her daughters coped with it all a little too smoothly. Leah repeatedly decided not to talk to her teenage daughters about what they are going through. And somehow the daughters just carried on with their lives and occasionally even saved the day in difficult situations. I just didn’t buy it. There was also a lot of “is he/isn’t he” about Robert which made sense but went back and forth too many times.

This was a decent read with some shortcomings. show less

Robert is a dick.

At times, Callanan writes with floral beauty and stirring insight, and his vignettes of Paris are obviously inspired by a genuine affinity that drips with verisimilitude. Paris by the Book raised two significant problems for me, however, which suppressed my overall enjoyment of the read. One is that the only likable characters present in it are the four children – both Leah's daughters and the family's twin charges through the bookstore. And the second is that while the prose is competent and evocative, it also god-awfully meanders like it's lost in the back-alley warrens of Ménilmontant. The narration stumbles over itself and loses cohesion through repeated staccato asides and time-skips. The rousing mystery teased show more on both covers and in the story itself is hardly mysterious, but rather a demonstration of wretched family disfunction, poor relationship choices, and the inability for two creative parents to communicate and commit – to each other and to their family. It is a manifesto about adults who have children before they, themselves, have fully developed on the inside. That is perhaps the most realistic angle Callanan takes, but possibly not an intentional one.

I might enjoy further musing and consideration of the larger dream-versus-reality themes that the author lays bare in the book's closing discussion points. When it comes down to it, though, Je suis à court de temps. show less

I finished this book really, really mad at the husband. This novel, set in Paris, is centered around an American family - a husband, wife, and two daughters. The husband disappears from their home in Milwaukee and the wife and daughters move to Paris, France, a few months later, thinking the trip will help them find answers in the few clues they have about the husband's disappearance. There are plenty of awkward incidents and some humor, but I failed to find much charm in this novel. The setting didn't change the fact that this family was grieving and struggling - all for a reason that made me angry by the conclusion.