Customer Reviews

Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language from the South of France

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This isn't the France of travel magazines and guidebooks. It is France seen with the discerning eye of a writer, the loving heart of a mother and the self-effacing wit of an easy-going American in the land of women who iron their children's pajamas. The book's format - weaving French lessons into vignettes of her life in South France - is quite unique and I loved learning the kind of colloquial French I didn't get in classes. But what makes the book so special is Espinasse's humanity. Anyone can describe lavender, cobblestones and the pecadilloes of the French, but here is a woman who notices the little ironies and blessings in everyday life common to us all and has the talent to render them with humor, grace and charm. Even after I finished, I kept picking it up to reread. It's that good.

A perfect book for lovers of France and the French language, for armchair travelers and wishful thinkers - and for newcomers who wish to understand more of the mysterious French ways! How come I write about this book? This is easily explained: for some years I've been one of the lucky e-mail subscribers to Kristin Espinasse's French-Word-A-Day writings (on which the book is based), providing wonderfully witty, humorous and helpful, poetic and profound insights into her life in France. We share her children's growing up in France, we are informed about her husband's work in his vineyards, we get to know her relationship with neighbors and friends, we read about those precious moments when her adopted country generously opens up new horizons for thought and outlook on life in general and especially in France. Always her observations are presented with great respect for the people she meets, never putting them down, yet keeping just enough distance to see and listen to them with a writer's mind. If you want to get into a French mood, if you plan to travel to France, virtual or otherwise, or if you just want to be entertained in an amusing, intelligent and uplifting way, this book is truly a must-have. It not only includes those lovingly detailed stories but provides helpful examples on proper use of words and phrases. Oh, and yes, you do brush up your French in a most entertaining and easy fashion: learning a language can indeed be fun! Put it on your list of Books to Buy - you can't go wrong!

As someone who has read just about every book written by individuals who have chosen to live in France, I rate this book at the top of the list. I first became aware of Kristin's blog when I was attempting to improve my French. In reality, I continue to read Kristin's pieces because she is witty, a great writer, and most of all not pretentious. She is so sincere, and you feel a special closeness to her because she speaks from the heart. She has become "mon amie" from France who always makes me smile.

Kristy writes with charming simplicity! Her words capture our imagination taking us behind the blue shutters of Provence. There her hand opens wide the view of the life we dream to see inside...cupboards full of homemade goodness, baskets stacked high of humor, dresser drawers overflowing with lavender-scented laundry! Kristy shows us her family, their lives in France, with her collection of tender hearted love and words that you want gobble up page by page!
A wonderful, delightful, enchanting book to help you learn French while eating a baguette and saying, "Bien Bien Encore!"

Terrific book! As an American wanting to pick up more French, I find "Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language from the South of France" a simply delightful read. This is a great book to pick up and read the very well written and reflective antidotes. As a librarian, I will make sure this book is available at our library. Kristen touches my soul with each chapter as a parent, a lover of the French language, one married to an immigrant...and oh,on so many levels. I find myself associating with her writing "from the heart". She truly speaks the language, the tongue of many with finesse! Love this book. Tres bien! Encore, encore!!

As an American boy growing up in rural France, I would so have enjoyed meeting a sophisticated, yet all-American matron in the next town like Kristin Espinasse, who was way after my time. She is still a relatively young woman and had been in France only thirteen years, so people still ask her "Ca vous manque les Etats-Unis?"

As she admits, she missed things instead of people, as befits an observer whose preference is for the storied multitudinousness of things. She missed cranberry cocktails, peanut butter, shower curtains, happy hour, air conditioning and even the humble family meal of Thanksgiving that comes once a year here in the States. She did not miss her home nor the people she had grown up with. But those of us who have followed her famous blog for years know why, for she had fallen in love with a GRAND example of French l'amour, a wine salesman who is known far and wide to readers of "French Word a Day" as "Sex on Two Legs." Her humble desert home in Phoenix had some appealing, American modernist touches, the stark white light you see on Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of cow skulls and hydrangea, or the little roadrunner that Arizona youth take as their emblem. But in provence where Espinasse now makes her home, her maison, all bets are off and so far away are her Modernist touchstones that she has stumbled, like Kate Hudson in the Merchant-Ivory film LE DIVORCE, into an incredibly simple world of ancient France, where vocabulary is the key to understanding. Some Espinasse fans love her kids, while I sometimes find them a little annoying, the way they are constantly picking on their mom for her (absurdly minor) mistakes in French--are they somehow picking up on tensions in her marriage, or are they just born brats--what my grandma used to call "fresh"? As an American boy in France, I thought all adults, both native born and tourist, in alliance against the kids; certainly they managed to show a united front of hauteur. At Chez Espinasse, every time poor Kristin fumbles for a word, the kids are in her face sneering triumphantly like mean little Napoleons.

Some readers in my book club have complained that none of the charming photos that decorate her blog manage to make their way into the book. They echo Alice in Wonderland when they complain, "What use is a book without pictures or conversations"? Well, there are plenty of conversations here, and not all of them the dispiriting kind in which your children snicker as you mispronounce "sans" as "cent," (without, for 100). Her neighbors, some of them the very French farming and shopowning kin that feature in Peter Mayle's bestselling books about Provence, have a lot of face time, and even some of her American friends make an appearance from time to time. You will learn oodles of French without even knowing it--tu piges? ("Get it?")

I enjoyed this book so much, I'm getting another copy for my daughter to take on vacation. It was interesting to learn not only about life in France but about Kristin as she adjusts to her life there. She observes herself as acutely and entertainingly as she does her new home. I found the book while browsing the travel section, I'd never heard of her blog before this - the reviewer below me is right, she's got a terrific blog with beautiful photos, but I think he's way off about the book. I found it worked both as a story read straight through, which gives a fascinating and satisfying total picture, or as vignettes read as separate chunks.

The value of this charming and instructive book by a natural writer and observer of the (French) social scene is that it makes picking up new vocabulary easy because you remember the lovely stories in which they were packaged.

This is part soap opera, part cultural exchange, part charming honesty, part ingenuousness, and, overall, a very natural and entertaining way to enhance one's French vocabulary at the same time one gains an understanding of the culture that comes along with that language.

It is delightful to be a fly on the wall during the culture shock of a French major from the American Southwest finding love and community in La France.

I have been a reader of her blog for a while and benefited from that, but it is a different, and better, experience to read some of her best columns in book form, which, by the way, suggests in its design the south of France, a Mediterranean touch stylewise. It's a handsome dustcover.

This unique book will have you learning French while chuckling at her account of getting 'hung up' on entering the church for her wedding. Such refreshing candor! You'll love this book.

Addenda:

Kristin's web columns are so good I wondered how I could access as many as possible of her previous work. Voila! As a Google mail holder, I found could go to one of their services called Google Reader which allows one to add RSS (really simple syndication) feeds to that page and access them in a convenient fashion (summary or listing). When I added the URL for her webpage, Google went out, got the RSS and placed it on a list to the left of the page. I found the LIST format most useful for scrolling backwards in time more than a year to see all her French Words on which I could click to get the original page with all her vocabulary suggestions and her delightful stories.

Her genius is that she places new French vocablulary gently amongst a story, otherwise in English, that is so interesting that one wants to read it to the end, and then look over the associated words and phrases.

In effect, one learns new French words from the context in which they are placed in the English language story. Enormously clever and effective. It resembles the way we learn vocabulary in our own language: from context.

This book is a compilation of vignettes on daily life in France from an Arizonan who married a French wine merchant. Her offerings are written in a delightful way, and include her lessons in humility by both being an American living in France and by having French-born children who are willing to correct her mistakes! I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a cross-cultural experience, but especially to those like me who love all things French.

Words in a French life is a fascinating look into the French culture. A vignette for each word!