A review by karteabooks
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller

5.0

 Yet another bookstagram made me do it purchase. I’m just wondering why I left this on my tbr for so long as it was another book that I should have picked up ages ago! 

 

It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace"—the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn't forever changed the course of their lives. As Heller colours in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity. Tender yet devastating, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes and misdemeanours of families. 

 

This is a book that will stay with me for a long time. So many issues were dealt with in this book, both emphatically and thoughtfully. From the outset, everything looks completely fine, and everyone is happy going about their lives, but a ‘chance’ meeting at The Paper Palace leads to everything precariously hanging in the balance, and the will they / won’t they decision is left right until the last page, to keep you completely engaged and wanting to read to the very end. 

 

This book is up there within my books of the year and it certainly got me out of a bit of a reading slump too and I was completely immersed in this book for several days, I even took it to work to try to read some during my breaks which I haven’t done with a book for quite a while. 

 

I say this very rarely, but this is a book that I would like to see as a movie or a TV series, it would just work so well. 

 

I highly recommend this book, but I suggest you might want to check the trigger warnings first, as this book doesn’t mince its words and is very descriptive.