Review | Paris In Love by Eloisa James – with Audiobook Notes

First of all, Eloisa James is a published historical romance author. In reading the “before Paris” parts of the book, I learned that Ms. James is a cancer survivor with an Italian husband and two children. She and her husband decided to take a sabbatical from their jobs and their lives in America “to live someone else’s life–specifically, that of a person who lived in Paris.” (loc 141, Kindle) So they sold their belongings and off they went. 

Example page from Paris In Love – see the story structure? Each paragraph is a separate thought. Easy to read but less cohesive than I wanted.

Each chapter begins with an essay-length story about a specific event or experience: something like a holiday experience while they lived in Paris, a vacation they took, a family trip to a very classy, high-end restaurant. After the essay, however, the rest of each chapter is filled with short paragraphs that are anecdotal and not really connected at all. I’m talking a few sentences and almost always one paragraph. There may be a description of what the sky looked like on a particular day, how well one of the children did on a test that was taken in school, a thought on Parisian fashion, or something like of this sort. These were charming and easy to listen to, but I have to admit that they didn’t really provide any depth to this year-long Parisian experience. If I understand the author’s introduction chapter correctly, these anecdotal paragraphs are taken from Facebook and Twitter posts that she made throughout her year in Paris; Facebook statuses seem to be what make up this memoir. This explains why they are a little on the disjointed side to me in terms of being chronologically linear and cohesive. 


I know this may sound like I did not like this book — in fact, it is quite the contrary. I just want to be clear on what we have here. Paris In Love is a great book to have in your to-read pile for a feel-good read. I ended up reading it at a time when I didn’t particularly need a feel-good read and was longing for a great travel memoir to help settle my wanderlust and ache for adventure. Ultimately, I liked this one but it is not going into my reread pile. 


Paris In Love by Eloisa James was a cute book and compilation of the author’s thoughts on her time spent in Paris. Very easy, very breezy. More than anything, I wish I was able to connect more with the city of Paris itself because the setting was one of the reasons I picked up this book in the first place. I enjoyed the brief anecdotal storytelling even though this story structure was a complete surprise. I think that this book would be a great one for readers that are looking to read more nonfiction or memoirs because of this structure and also the lovely language Ms. James uses, and I would recommend it also to those readers that enjoy all-things-France.