I have read mixed reviews (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-paris-wife-by-paula-mclain.html) of The Paris Wife but I have to say I am enjoying every page of it.

First of all, consider the title.  If you have chosen to be a wife, why not be one in Paris?!  Now I understand the French can be notoriously rude to Americans, especially if we try to engage them with our horrible version of their delicate language. And of course French husbands are famously unfaithful, can have prominent noses and smell too strongly of Bleu De Channel. But you can’t beat other aspects of the parisian wife lifestyle.  Intimate sidewalk cafes, evening strolls by the Seine, the art museums, the shopping, the adorable tiny cars, wine at lunch, the shopping, wine at teatime, the shopping, the food, the wine, the shopping.  You get the picture.

And beyond the romance of imagining yourself as a Paris wife, this Paris wife is married to Ernest Hemingway! Now here again, he may have been no dreamboat to live with and perhaps a little egotistical and for sure a man’s man who loved more than a few fingers of scotch, beautiful women and indulged an insatiable lust for adventure. Aside from that, the author, Paula McLain, paints an intimate portrait of the world Hemingway and his wife Hadley inhabited in Paris in the early 1920’s. Carousing with the fabled “Lost Generation” in the City of Light, Ernest and Hadley are part of quite a crowd– Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott and Zelda.  I mean, really.  Can you imagine it?  All these young, ambitious, struggling, soon-to-be-famous artists come to life on the page and play out the stories that put us to sleep in eighth grade English but entice and haunt us as adults.

Pick it up.  Especially in hardback.  As you can see it has a great cover, but it’s hard to beat what lies beneath it.