Title: THE PAPER PALACE
Author: Miranda Cowley Heller
Read: August 2024
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 all the stars!
Book Description (Goodreads):
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 colors 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 misdemeanors of families.
My musings:
THE PAPER PALACE is a complex story about love in its
many shapes and sizes: the sweet first love of youth, the enduring love of a
happy marriage, the forbidden love between two people who have lost each other
along the way and give in to the “what-could-have-been”. Taking place over the
course of just 24-hours, the story explores what makes Elle, a fifty-something
mother of three, cheat on her husband with her childhood sweetheart during a
summer holiday in their family’s summer house. Don’t judge her to harshly,
because by the end of the book you will understand the complex circumstances
leading up to this fateful night.
I’m no longer sure what brought THE
PAPER PALACE to my attention because I delved into it blindly without knowing
anything about it, but I am so happy that it crossed my path – it was
definitely one of my favourite books for 2024. Miranda Cowley Heller has a way
of writing that brought the story and its characters to life for me, until I
could picture it all as clearly as if I had lived in their midst. If you usually shy away from romance, don’t
dismiss this book quite yet, because this certainly wasn’t a happily-ever-after
love story. Even the idyllic setting hinted of a darkness lurking, which wasn’t
revealed until much later in the book and shook me to the core, as was
intended. However, I love stories about family dynamics and dark secrets, and
here the author’s keen observations about human nature offered a complex,
well-told tale that kept me enthralled from beginning to end.
