4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Tender, Funny and Smart, March 22, 2010
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.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
De-Flowering Romance, January 5, 2011
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
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Authentic and well-written, March 31, 2010
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.
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