- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Scribner (Sep 1 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 141659972X
- ISBN-13: 978-1416599722
- Product Dimensions: 21.9 x 14 x 2.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 431 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,297,817 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“McAndrew can do cross-cultural humor with the flair of Diane Johnson, but she also has her own kind of sophistication—an international knowingness coupled with an American practicality.”
--The New York Times
“McAndrew has immense talent for calling up vastly different settings in precise detail, and her observations, as realized by her clear-eyed protagonist, are deliciously sharp-edged. Dense with context and deeply nuanced, yet effortlessly readable. McAndrew is a real find.”
--Kirkus Reviews
“A sophisticated coming-of-age story.”
--Daily Candy
“McAndrew's casual but assured depictions of life among the upper crust of Paris and New York and wry voice, make this coming-of-age novel a delectable treat.
--Publishers Weekly
“McAndrew’s novel brings an original sensibility as well as a plot that takes satisfying, unexpected turns.”
--The New York Times
Product Description
A compelling and poignant coming-of-age story about a sharply observant American girl’s young adulthood in Paris and New York set against the backdrop of Europe’s most turbulent decade—for readers of Curtis Sittenfeld, Diane Johnson, and Lorrie Moore.
For Charlotte Sanders, a precocious and privileged fifteen-year-old American girl growing up in Paris in the late 1970s, life has a dreamy quality. Her father, a lawyer and quiet intellectual, spends evenings reading Balzac in his study and listening to opera. Her sister is a star rider at the equestrian club. And her mother Astrid is charming, gor- geous, and charismatic. But Charlotte’s peaceful existence is turned upside down when Astrid has an affair with a Polish Communist-resister and the family is shattered. Charlotte and her mother move to New York, where reduced circumstances and Astrid’s unwillingness to face reality force Charlotte to quickly grow up. Charlotte observes her mother’s stylish ego- centricity with both disdain and awe as she lives through her own unhappy love affair and finally confronts the emotional scars left by her parents’ divorce.
Featuring pitch-perfect descriptions of Parisian life, this enchanting story is warm, witty, and smart. It is an endear- ing portrayal of the challenges of adolescence and an honest account of one girl’s discovery that where we come from makes us who we are.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon Canada
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.3 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Tender, Funny and Smart, Mar 22 2010
By Blake Fraina - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dreaming in French: A Novel (Hardcover)
Megan McAndrew's Dreaming in French is the tender, funny and smart story of Charlotte, a teenage girl in 1980's Paris, growing up against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Europe. After the divorce of her American parents, Frank a stuffy, conservative lawyer and Astrid, a bohemian free-spirit, she and her newly penurious mother move to New York where they must start over. Charlotte is forced to mature quickly in order to bring some order into a household badly mismanaged by the extravagant and impractical Astrid. But ultimately, it is a much more daunting challenge that is Charlotte's true right of passage to womanhood.
Something about the subject matter and tone very much reminds me of the coming-of-age novels I gravitated to when I was in school. Iris Murdoch's Flight From the Enchanter, Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse and Nora Johnson's The World of Henry Orient all come to mind. It has all the drama of youth with its bigger than life emotions - the yearnings, rebellions and heartaches. And every character, Astrid in particular, is colorful and affectionately rendered. It's refreshing to read a novel where you have no sense that the author is passing judgment on her characters. She merely presents them, warts and all, through the POV of her somewhat ennuyé, but level-headed, narrator, Charlotte, and leaves it up to the reader to form his/her own opinion. As for me, I liked all of them - even a boy who seemed rather caddish at the outset, reveals redeeming qualities by the end.
While I mostly enjoyed the book, several minor, but cloying, details were a bit hard to overlook. Astrid, a svelte and fashionable sophisticate, and her sister Maybelle, an overweight polyester-clad yokel, seemed too appropriately named. Almost as if their parents knew in advance what they would grow up to be. I realize this is almost too small to mention, but obvious false notes tend to pull me out of the story somewhat. Plus, the ending is a just a bit too tidy. Although, to be fair, sometimes it's enjoyable to get a satisfying sense of closure...even in literary fiction, which can be quite bleak.
I very much enjoyed this book. It brought me back to all my youthful aspirations about one day living a glamorous life in a cosmopolitan center like London, New York or Paris. If you're a fan of such authors as Penelope Fitzgerald, Francoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch or Edna O'Brien, you'll love Dreaming in French.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Authentic and well-written, Mar 31 2010
By Anonymous - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dreaming in French: A Novel (Hardcover)
I picked up this book a bit hesitantly. I grew up in Paris in the seventies and I have often been disappointed (even infuriated) by some American writers writing about France without apparently ever having set foot there. When a character who is supposedly native makes basic French mistakes ("Avons la petit-dejeuner!") you know you're wasting your time. McAndrews is not one of those authors. I could tell right away that she had spent a good deal of her childhood in Paris, and not a single detail felt inauthentic. In addition, the story is gripping and extremely well-written. You just can't go wrong buying this book.
3.0 out of 5 stars
De-Flowering Romance, Jan 5 2011
By John F. Lehman - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dreaming in French: A Novel (Paperback)
I loved the first half of this book. There is something about a Paris setting and adolescent, first love that seem perfectly matched. American readers experience the wonder of something new as the young girl does. Then her mother takes up with a Polish dissident. The parents split and we are in Warsaw with Charlotte, visiting her mother in jail. The disintegrating family and the bleak Eastern European setting again match perfectly in tone, but....
When mother and daughter return to the States, I was less thrilled. We seemed to be following characters in a story that life passes by. Granted, when Astrid, the mother, gets leukemia and the father remarries we are looking what we had experienced through a more mature perspective. But is this something readers want? We learn that desire is not the same as love, that it's the things that we don't understand that matter, that people require care and there is only so much of ourselves to give?
Or do we want through our imagination to re-experience that magic feeling of first falling in love?
- John Lehman, Rosebud Book Reviews.com
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
