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Paris is Always a Good Idea

This book is a very fast read. I finished it in a matter of hours. It has a fairly simple plot, and I found I was reading it more for the setting and atmosphere than the characters.

Rosalie is an illustrator and owner of a postcard shop in Paris where she sells paper goods and gifts and hand-painted cards for every occasion. She’s the sort of often-twee heroine who knows Something Momentous is about to happen, and then it does. She’s also the type for whom starting her own business with a somewhat unique product line does not produce too many obstacles.

She meets an older man who comes in and knocks over the stand of her cards in the doorway. He changes her life. Another, much younger man comes in, also knocking over the postcard stand, and he changes her life, too. Things Happen. They’re all happy in the end, but they’re usually foretold moments before by someone making the postcard stand crash to the floor. I think if she wanted a day off of Things Happening, she’d move it away from the door.

The story is ferociously indulgent with the heroine. Pages are spent on how much Rosalie likes blue, and how she knew what she wanted and stubbornly went after it. Every year on her birthday, she paints a wish for herself on a card and lets it fly from the second level of the Eiffel Tower. Slowly her wishes come true, mostly through coincidence or because it was time in the plot for those Things to Happen.

I wasn’t deeply invested in any of the characters – Rosalie, Max, Robert, Rosalie’s mother – as they were often more than halfway made of stereotypes: the distant, elegant, uppity mother; the disheveled American out of step with the rhythm of a new country; the cranky, curmudgeon who mourns his wife and doesn’t like change.

They also operate in isolation for the most part. Rosalie doesn’t have any friends she speaks with outside of the main characters and her landlord, who exist to cause a minor wrinkly when he raises her rent. Robert only has a frosty girlfriend who is waiting for him to give up literature and go back to law, and speaks with no one else.

I liked the setting, the touches of Paris that the characters wandered through, though those too were stereotypes – the Pont Neuf bridge covered with locks, the croissants each morning from the boulangerie, the waiters in long aprons who aren’t interested in serving anyone. The portrayal of Paris is like a postcard, too. Major highlights, not a lot of intimate depth.

I appreciated that it was easy reading, that it didn’t challenge my sleepy morning airport brain. I appreciated the simplicity of the story, as it was exactly what I wanted while I read while waiting for a plane at 6am. It didn’t blow me away or give me much to say about it, but it distracted me when I wanted to be distracted. Paris is Always a Good Idea didn’t surround me with the vividness that I like in contemporary fiction, but it told a simple, neat, easy story exactly when I needed one.

– SB Sarah

Rosalie Laurent is the proud owner of Luna Luna, a little post-card shop in St. Germain, and if it were up to her, far more people would write cards. Her specialty is producing “wishing cards,” but where her own wishes are concerned the quirky graphic artist is far from lucky. Every birthday Rosalie sends a card inscribed with her heart’s desire fluttering down from the Eiffel Tower – but none of her wishes has ever been fulfilled.

Then one day when an elderly gentleman trips up in her shop and knocks over a post-card stand, it seems that her wish cards are working after-all. Rosalie finds out that it is Max Marchais, famed and successful author of children’s books who’s fallen into her life. When he asks her to illustrate his new (and probably last) book, Rosalie is only too glad to accept, and the two – very different – maverick artists become friends.

Rosalie’s wishes seem to be coming true at last, until a clumsy American professor stumbles into her store with accusations of plagiarism. Rosalie is hard pressed to know whether love or trouble is blowing through her door these days, but when in doubt, she knows that Paris is Always a Good Idea when one is looking for the truth and finding love.