Paris By The Book | Liam Callanan

It wasn't until 2/3 of the way through this book that I remembered that I'd already read it! Not surprising since I read pretty much anything with the words Book, Bookstore, Bookshop, Library, Librarian -- you get the idea -- in the title. The fact that the book seemed a little familiar didn't bother me since I do tend to read the same types of books BUT the fact that it took me so long to remember that I'd read the whole thing, to me, said that the book wasn't fantastic. It's not bad by any stretch. A story of a woman whose husband disappears one day with cryptic clues left that cause her to move her daughters to Paris to find him--it's intriguing! I love mother/daughter stories and who doesn't like hearing about Paris? It's a nice vacation / palate cleanser kind of book.

Here's what I really noticed on my second pass, though. Clearly the father was having a mental health crisis that led to his disappearance. The lack of support, compassion and recognition of this by Leah seems pretty harsh. The heavy lifting of trying to discover what happened to her husband fell to a friend, which felt pretty weird. Ok, ok, so this was her story not his, but a little compassion could have made her search for him in Paris (which opens the book in a prologue) more impactful, more poignant. The daughters talked about missing him but really, if your husband and dad disappeared without a trace, wouldn't you be a little bit more torn up about it?

As an aside, this writer also wrote a novel called The Cloud Atlas. I haven't read it but I read another, completely different and highly original post-modern novel by the same title, by an Australian writer (David Mitchell in 2004). I have no idea what Callanan's book is like but seeing the title makes me want to re-read Mitchell's book which travels through time and space. I'm wondering how it compares to Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr in that sense. Hmmmmm.

Read on!