Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I won an advance copy of Michelle Gable’s I’ll See You in Paris in November of 2016; I finally finished it this month because hey, I had an 18-month-old back then, and I’m STILL catching up. (This is not news.) And oh, how I wish I’d liked it better! I always appreciate winning an advance copy (and I’m working towards being more timely with my responses), but I also give honest reviews–and so, here you are.

What I liked:
1. The story of the Duchess of Marlborough. Seriously, why hasn’t there been a movie about this woman? And if there has been, why don’t I know about it?
2. The tone of the fictitious book that started Annie’s journey. It was dry and witty and thoroughly entertaining.
3. Most of the British characters, more or less. They were relatively well-drawn.

What I didn’t:
1. Annie. She was a teenager, a college student, drifting, purposeful, rebellious, a mommy’s girl–she was whatever Gable needed her to be to move her plot along. What she WASN’T was a believable recent college graduate with her stated backstory.
2. The military fiance. He felt like a paper character and a plot device, and any talk of his and Annie’s relationship (or him at all) felt completely contrived.
3. The gratuitous language. There did NOT need to be that many F-words, or that much language in general. It, too, felt contrived.
4. Laurel. She didn’t really make any more sense than Annie did.

Conclusion:
If Michelle Gable had turned her research into a nonfiction exploration of the Duchess, I would have enjoyed the book far better. It’s not that the concept didn’t have promise–the trip to England, a mother’s hidden past, a daughter’s fascination with a decades-old mystery–but the execution was underwhelming. It’s obvious from its reviews on Goodreads that not everyone agrees with me, so if you don’t know me well, it’s entirely possible you should read it for yourself. If you do know me well, I would have recommended it to you if I’d thought you’d like it–and I didn’t.