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clarebell23's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Child death, Death, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Grief, Infidelity, Miscarriage, Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, and Terminal illness
definebookish's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? No
2.0
Fifty pages into The Paper Palace, I went searching for strangers’ reviews. Those I’d read before picking up a copy had been overwhelmingly positive about the story of middle-aged Elle, torn between her good-egg husband Peter and childhood sweetheart Jonah in the present while reflecting on a traumatic past. I found myself struggling a lot with it, and wondering if others had.
I don’t think there are subjects that should be off limits for fiction. Many of the one-star reviews I found of The Paper Palace seemed to attribute their low rating to instances of child abuse in the story. Initially, I thought this was an odd response – like rating the evening news one-star because the headlines are disturbing. However, having finished the book, it’s this element that is most problematic for me. Not that the author has written about such a harrowing subject at all, or necessarily that she’s framed it within a romance. But in my opinion, the treatment of multiple characters’ unthinkable childhood trauma isn’t appropriately sensitive, and at times verges on sensationalist.
Beyond that, I’m ambivalent. The back woods Cape Cod setting is vividly drawn, and so is Elle’s mouse-infested family camp – the paper palace of the title, symbolic of family legacy and inherited trauma – almost to the point of nausea. The few scenes in England, however, hit somewhere between a Richard Curtis romcom, Taylor Swift’s London Boy, and 1980s episodes of Eastenders. (“F*ck off, ya c*nt,” says Elle’s pig-faced mugger. “He’ll be a bit cross when he comes to,” pipes up Elle’s rescuer and plummy future husband Peter, who lamps the scoundrel and offers her a lift in his Land Rover.)
The wider characterisation, too, I found patchy. Several secondary players are stereotypes; Peter’s English parents ‘disapprove of’ Americans, and both Elle’s stepmothers are essentially wicked. Grown-up Jonah feels like a (horny) sketch. The perpetrator of the abuse is skin-crawlingly well rendered, though that contributed to my reservations about the treatment of that storyline.
Elle is hugely sympathetic as a child, and I appreciated that the author chose to portray a middle-aged woman getting steamy. But there are also a few scenes in which adult Elle is deeply unpleasant as a narrator. In the first she describes the woman behind the counter at Avis as acting like she thinks she ‘works at the post office’ and walking ‘slow as mud.’ In the second, she’s furious when she’s racing to a loved one’s bedside and the hospital elevator is set to stop at every floor because it’s Shabbat – she’s always considered herself a tolerant person, but… Perhaps these are intended to show us something about the steely determination of her survival mode, but to me they felt entitled, especially in the wider context of this book’s WASPy world.
I didn’t like it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia, Child abuse, and Rape
Moderate: Child death, Infidelity, Grief, and Fatphobia
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