"We were staying at David's apartment in Paris the night the woman fell onto the Metro tracks."
The opening line of Anstey Harris's debut reads like the start of a suspense novel, but that's not where Goodbye, Paris goes. What happens next is captured on CCTV and the video goes viral, shining an unwelcome spotlight on David and his many secrets. The fallout shatters the picture that Grace--his girlfriend and the story's narrator--has had about their eight-year-relationship, and their plans for their future. But in her lowest moments, she finds she's not alone. Kindness comes from Mr. Williams, an octogenarian who's a regular at Grace's violin-making and -repair shop, and Nadia, the 17-year-old girl Grace employs at the shop on weekends. Together they help Grace mend the broken pieces of her life, showing her there's more than one kind of family.
Grace repeatedly claims she's neither naive nor stupid, but she appears to be the former when it comes to David. She's mostly isolated--lives alone, doesn't socialize much, her parents are dead and she has no siblings--but these are unconvincing reasons for how an almost 40-year-old can be so gullible and for so long. Her trusting spirit, however, will also keep readers rooting for her in order to see goodness triumph over deception. Though predictable in plot, Paris surprises with where it finds romance--in descriptions of mouthwatering food, the way Grace lovingly crafts her instruments and how she discovers her own self-worth. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd