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A review by ashleyhorning
Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris by Sarah Turnbull
2.0
I love travel memoirs. I especially love travel memoirs when it's set in Paris, France. Which is why I was so surprised at how uninterested I became during my read through Almost French.
Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris is exactly how it sounds. A young woman in her late twenties settles down in Paris with a Frenchman on a whim. Triumphs and trials ensue. Learning the language, social differences and accepting her new, different life from Australia is of course difficult at first but rewarding in the end when she overcomes them all. At first her career struggles but then it soars. When she first arrives in France she finds it difficult to make friends but by the end of the novel she's volunteering in soup kitchens.
While parts of the novel were interesting, I always love to learn and understand new cultures and their habits, I found it hard to understand the actual point or plot of the book. There was no climax or resolution. In the end her and her Frenchman get married but even that is lacking the excitement a usual wedding entails.
For a book that seemingly focuses on love, there was very little to do with that in the book. The connection between the author and her lover/Frenchman/husband was never clearly explained and it always almost seemed as if they were just roommates. I had to assume they liked each other as they had bought a house and a dog together but at the same time there was no real connection between the two. I felt that during the first part of the book, when the author struggled with her French language skills, that could have been used to better explain their connection to each other and then that could have been connected throughout the book. Mostly I felt a bigger, stronger connection between the author and her dog rather than her husband.
I suppose when one considers moving to a country that has not been their own growing up and you do not know the language one would imagine hard times to come. That said, I'm not really sure what the author was trying to do here with the book other than saying, "yeah that's happened to me too" and then rattles on with a story to relate.
Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris is exactly how it sounds. A young woman in her late twenties settles down in Paris with a Frenchman on a whim. Triumphs and trials ensue. Learning the language, social differences and accepting her new, different life from Australia is of course difficult at first but rewarding in the end when she overcomes them all. At first her career struggles but then it soars. When she first arrives in France she finds it difficult to make friends but by the end of the novel she's volunteering in soup kitchens.
While parts of the novel were interesting, I always love to learn and understand new cultures and their habits, I found it hard to understand the actual point or plot of the book. There was no climax or resolution. In the end her and her Frenchman get married but even that is lacking the excitement a usual wedding entails.
For a book that seemingly focuses on love, there was very little to do with that in the book. The connection between the author and her lover/Frenchman/husband was never clearly explained and it always almost seemed as if they were just roommates. I had to assume they liked each other as they had bought a house and a dog together but at the same time there was no real connection between the two. I felt that during the first part of the book, when the author struggled with her French language skills, that could have been used to better explain their connection to each other and then that could have been connected throughout the book. Mostly I felt a bigger, stronger connection between the author and her dog rather than her husband.
I suppose when one considers moving to a country that has not been their own growing up and you do not know the language one would imagine hard times to come. That said, I'm not really sure what the author was trying to do here with the book other than saying, "yeah that's happened to me too" and then rattles on with a story to relate.