Paula McLain Creates a Riveting Concoction of Delicately Woven Lines | The Paris Wife - Review

To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.  - The Paris Wife

The Paris Wife is a riveting concoction of rabid one liners carefully woven into delicate chapters.  I was browsing in the best sellers list and pulled other raved about titles such as Sarah’s Key, The Dovekeepers, The Night Circus.  At the point in which I opened The Paris Wife, I was withered, unamused, and even aggravated by the terrible writing that I explored prior.  I was at the point where I was skimming through the first sentence and saying, yep - crap.  I think I gazed at the first line of The Paris Wife and put it down, pretty much by mistake.  I was too aggravated to read another line and get into a peaceful place in my head where I could thoroughly enjoy a book.

I think I shuffled around the bookstore for a bit, but afterwards, for some reason, I opened The Paris Wife again and there was a line that struck my eyes on the second page.

Across the courtyard, a sawmill buzzed steadily from seven in the morning until five at night, and there was always the smell of fresh cut wood, and sawdust filtered in under the windowsills and doorframes and got in our clothes and made us cough.

Suddenly, I was hooked.  I felt like I finally caught a connection to a book.  The way the words formed in a polite cadence, slowly moving to form a simple yet perfectly rounded picture was incredible.  From that sentence on, I fell into the book unaware of time, place, and the literal action that I was indeed reading a book.

Along with it’s splendor in imagery, The Paris Wife also showed an appetite for dialogue that was courageous and realistic.  Clever, even.  Not clever in a way that most writers take a step back, but say, ha, that sounds clever, people will like that.  Clever in a confident way that says, this is how people talk because I’ve been in conversations and I know what I’m talking about.

The dialogue is full, it’s realistic.  It’s not rushed and it rings like a normal conversation.  Most writers sound like they’re trying to escape having to write dialogue by keeping the voices short, or going off in long monologues.  Nobody talks like that.  Paula Mclain’s writing keeps the dialogue so it actually sounds like the conversations normal people could relate to.  It keeps the space between the phrases, he said and she said, which keeps the focus on what the characters are actually saying.

I’ve caught up to page 12 in this novel.  It’s beautifully written and almost impossible not to get sucked into.