oatmealhead 's review for:

The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl

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The

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that Stella experienced felt a little shoehorned in and was dropped as a plot point pretty much immediately, almost as if it were introduced retroactively to justify the character’s distrust of others and hatred of her mother? It was so different from the rest of the book that by the end I had basically forgotten it had even happened until I started formulating my internal review. The prose was great, effortless to read, and the descriptions of food really shone for obvious reasons. The plot was contrived in a way that I enjoyed. Complete junk food, Parisian escapist fiction aside from the

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in the beginning of the novel. I read it over the course of a few days, super easy to breeze through. Not exactly a groundbreaking piece of writing but I enjoyed it plenty more than the last few duds I’ve read! Food, French escapism, art history- pretty solid!