Customer Reviews

Petite Anglaise

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As with others who have expressed disappointment with this book, I have to agree and chime in. I truly wanted to enjoy this story as I am keen on memoir and had once lived in Paris. Despite my predisposition to its premise, I found I couldn't enjoy it as the author comes across as quite narcissistic. So much of the narrative was filtered through what appears to be an endless abyss of insecurity. It made it difficult to relate to let alone find sympathy in her story. For example, she is forever interpreting less than lovely interactions as being done to or as affronts rather than realizing it's her approach and attitude that cause so much inner grief. My opinion of the book was sealed when I found myself repeatedly cringing at the author's descriptions of her toddler daughter. The author exults her romantic life to the detriment of other vital relationships. This book is one dimensional and ultimately a waste of time.

As her memoir opens, Catherine Sanderson has become an unhappy person. She loves her one-year-old daughter but finds motherhood demanding and frustrating. She is discontent in her relationship with her long-time partner. And even Paris, the city in which she's dreamed of living since childhood, is losing its luster for her.

So she finds a new love, ripe to be showered with devotion and attention. Well, she also has an affair. But the real object of Catherine's affection in the memoir Petite Anglaise is not "Jim from Rennes," who becomes her new boyfriend, but rather her blog, also called Petite Anglaise. Indeed, on a dull afternoon when her various sources of malcontent seem insurmountable, Catherine opens a page on her computer and starts writing. And then hits "publish," and a relationship is born.

This is the first memoir I've read about a girl and her blog. (The memoir "Julie and Julia" by Julie Powell stemmed from a blog, but the author makes only passing mention of it in the narrative, whereas for Sanderson it is a key player in her life.) At first, the blog is a creative outlet and an escape, but it gradually takes on the role of savior. Through her blog, she not only vents her feelings but also experiments a little bit. Like a lot of people, Catherine is a little more clever, a little sassier, a little more adventuresome in her writing than in her real life. Although she initially believes Petite Anglaise is merely a reflection of herself, she eventually comes to recognize that it is more, and as her life develops in new directions - she makes new friends through the blog, breaks up with her partner, and starts an affair with a reader - she gradually begins to question whether she is living through her character, whether her character is controlling her, or just what the releationship between the two -- the real Catherine Sanderson and the blog persona - might be.

Artists have explored the relationships between themselves and their creations ever since the myth of Pygmalion, and the fact that Sanderson uses the state-of-the-art social media to do it doesn't make this an entirely new story, but as blogging and other forms of social media such as Facebook becomes epidemic, it's interesting to think about who we are in relation to our screen selves. Sanderson isn't a fascinating or even always likable person, but she's willing to admit that, both to her memoir readers and to readers of her blog. She struggles with her decisions, and for every time she second-guesses herself, most notably when she breaks up with her daughter's father, she has dozens of blog readers chiming in with their own opinions in the "comments" section of her blog. The unexamined life may not be worth living, as Socrates said; the overexamined life, brought to us by Netscape, presents a whole other set of challenges.

Beyond the questions of blogging and self-reflection, Sanderson simply has an interesting story to tell about life as an ex-pat and young mother in Paris. She loves the city but struggles with its limitations - the daycare situation, the difficulty of finding a suitable apartment, even the dingy appearance of the city of light in late winter - and this memoir is enlightening for those aspects as well as the ones related to social media. Sanderson isn't always a terrific writer, and her romantic scenes border on the Harlequin-esque, but possibly that's the point, to some extent. She's not a great writer but we like reading about her anyway, because she's so candid and so real. And that may be the beauty of blogging.

This is a beach or airplane read. The author can be witty and she is at her best when she writes about everyday experiences in Paris, but too often her obsession with self and her tendency to take herself way too seriously get in the way. Sanderson's blog, especially the early entries, offers more of the light and entertaining anecdotal writing she is best at.

WARNING: SPOILER.

For those of you who have lived abroad, this is a fun read. However, I was not comfortable with the public deception. Even though the character is not married, she and her long term partner had a baby together and her partner deserved more respect, particularly since this is a true story and the character maintains a not-very-private blog. In other words, I appreciate that we can fall out of love with our partners, but I can't imagine her partner appreciated the public display of her complaints about their relationship and about her feelings for another man.

Aside from that, I enjoyed her descriptions of Paris, her love affair with another culture and her honesty regarding being a working mom.

I thought Sanderson's book was a fun beach book. However, some may take issue that the premise of her book is her story about cheating on her baby's father with another expat in France. That storyline could have been more highlighted. The advertising of the book is clever.

At times, Sanderson's point of view is gratingly self-absorbed, a sort of idealized narcissistic snapshot of a woman's familial betrayal and rise to internet star-dom.

I would have enjoyed more anecdotes on her raising a bilingual child and/or more snapshots from everyday life French life with highlights on food, etc. but it's essentially a very conceited narrative of an affair.

Nonetheless, engrossing.

beautiful cover, but disappointing content..
the writing was simplistic or simply bad and nothing about the story, whether it was actually true or not was interesting or even likable.. the narration is boring and self centered, felt like reading the diary of a 13 year old, minus the sense of humor..

Having followed Petite's blog off and on over a couple years, I actually had no intention of purchasing the book. Only because I thought perhaps it would be redundant of all her blog posts that I'd read. Wanting to support a fellow author, and because I'd always enjoyed her style of writing, I did pre-order this book.....and I was happily pleased.
First of all, I was impressed with the way Sanderson combined her blog postings effortlessly into a woven piece of work that read like fiction. I did recall a few of the incidents I'd previously read on her blog, but now written in a different way.
This is a delightful debut of a story that just happens to be true. The reader is allowed a glimpse behind the scenes, so to speak. I felt the depth of this author's writing was even stronger in her book than on her blog....and her writing on Petite Anglaise was excellent. But somehow I detected more emotion here than on her blog pages. So I was quite wrong to assume "it'll be identical to her blog."
Like the previous reader, I read this in two days. Much like her blog, I found myself setting the book down, only to be compelled to quickly resume reading.
Wishing much success to this author and looking forward to her fiction release.

I'm not sure that I'd really like Sanderson if I met her, but she certainly can be thought-provoking on occasion. And, I do admire her candor - even as I'm glad that none of my friends write about me so explicitly. The story is interesting and engaging (although sometimes a little inconsistently), and every now and then I wished there was a little less navel-gazing (but it is a memoir, after all). Still, a decent, lightweight read - good for vacation entertainment - but nothing you'd want to read again...

Not only did I enjoy this book, I also enjoyed the fact that it is the true story of a blogger who eventually turns her postings into a book. The author is an English young woman who fell in love with France and everything French when as a child she was introduced to the language and culture through French lessons at school. She spent her adolescence longing to go to France. Her dream to go on an exchange was not realized until at the age of 18 she was invited to spend two weeks with the French pen-pal she had found in the back of a French magazine, and had been corresponding with for a year and a half. That experience only whetted her appetite, so it wasn't many years before she did a year abroad in college. She eventually ended up in Paris with a teaching assistantship, her own Frenchman, an apartment, and a baby daughter. All of her dreams had come true! Unfortunately nagging dissatisfaction with her job, long hours spent alone as her lover focused on his career, and the feeling that she was saddled with all of the responsibilities of child-rearing, began to tarnish the patina of her dream. In an effort to relieve her boredom and fill her lonesome evenings with something creative and exciting, she began a blog about her life as an ex-pat, and took the pen name Petite Anglaise. What started out as a diversion, soon threatens to overtake her life. As she shares more personal and detailed information about her relationship with her lover, who is known as Mr. Frog, and her daughter, Tadpole, she becomes hugely popular with an enormous following. Eventually she blurs the line between reality and her blogging persona, and begins to question weather she is living her life for her readers rather than for herself. Ultimately she makes some decisions that change the course of her life, before realizing too late that she wasn't necessarily living in reality when she made them.

This was a good book, well written in a light and fun voice, with a good story. It included all of the elements of success, not the least of which was suspense, and left me pondering for days after I finished it. Regardless of what a person thinks of Catherine's choices concerning her personal life in the book, it is obvious in the end that she both learned and matured during the living and writing of her story, and you have to admire her guts in doing both in front of the world. I have ordered Catherine's second book, and look forward to spending more time with her, in a literary sense of the word.

Purchased during a spate of Francophilia, this book was in the travel section of my local superstore outlet. As this chain does not have a biography section, Travel may have seemed like an obvious place to catalogue it, but it would have been better served by being placed under the Relationships banner.

Young expat living la Vie francaise in Paris? Sounds good. But is was not to be. The hooks, being her life in Belleville and her love of all things French, are merely hooks. In the meat of the text, the location, the city and its people are barely mentioned. What is really of interest to the author via this book is her own belated coming-of-age. The location - the selling point for me - is rather irrelevant, as the story could have taken place anywhere, and rather than making its appeal global, it is an average tale of a 30-something woes, but stripped of the local colour that would have attracted me.

The tone is rather Cosmo-style; one of a girlfriend ruminating over coffee the failed aspirations of grown-up life. The honesty and directness in which that author recounts her desires and decisions, seedy betrayals and all are stirring. That she devotes little time thinking about the views and motivations of others outside of their direct interactions with herself makes her, in my view, rather unsuited to the book format. If this author has not been read by and snapped up to write for one of the glossy women's mags, then she should be.

But as a book, it held very little interest for me.