When 20-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier arrives in Paris in 1949, she's hoping to be wowed by architectural gems, delicious cuisine and chic fashions. In her third novel, Jacqueline in Paris, Ann Mah (The Lost Vintage; Mastering the Art of French Eating) delves into the more complicated reality of Jackie's year abroad: beauty and history in spades, but also the lingering shadows of the recent war and the uncertain threat of Communism.
After sailing across the Atlantic with her fellow students, Jackie settles into an apartment in Paris with the widowed Comtesse de Renty and her two grown daughters. Jackie dives into classes and cafés and wanders the city on her own. She begins to imagine a different life for herself, one free of social expectations and her mother's disapproval. That life seems tantalizingly close when she meets Jack Marquand, a dashing American writer. But even from thousands of miles away, the social pressures and financial realities of Jackie's future prove hard to ignore. And the more she learns about her hosts' wartime experiences, the more she struggles to reconcile her own sheltered life with what Paris, and all of Europe, has suffered. The intellectuals she meets also challenge her to reconsider her assumptions about politics, womanhood and love.
Mah sensitively describes postwar Paris in its hollow-cheeked elegance, letting readers see it through Jackie's sharp eyes. Jacqueline in Paris is a portrait of a young woman waking up to the world in its glory and heartbreak--and the beginning of Jackie's lifelong love affair with la belle France. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams