Amanda Dennis

I didn't dislike this book, but I wanted to like this more than I did for several reasons. The first is that I received a copy from the publisher through LibraryThing Early Reviewers over a year ago, and straight up forgot about it and I feel really guilty providing the review a year after publication. The second reason is that I was an Asia bum myself for two years at the same age as Ella in the book, and so the central story is something dear and familiar to me. While I did not spend a ton of time in Northern Thailand, I did spend several months on an island in the south. I was, i am sure, an obnoxious foreigner just like the people in this book, as were my friends. The events at X were VERY familiar. Still, that was the best time in my life and a book about that life should be right up my alley. The third reason is that I had just read a couple books set in Paris, and I was on an I miss Paris jag, and the summary made it seem like this would be the one to push me over the edge and just finally buy a plane ticket. In the end though, all the good will in the world could not get me over the problems with this book, and I cannot in good faith rate this higher than a 3-star.

The first problem is that the setup for this book is so utterly ridiculous I cannot be gotten around. So, an architect living in Paris secretly gave birth to a child when she was young and unmarried. She gave the baby to friends who took the baby back to America to raise her. The adoptive parents never told the child she was adopted until she was 21. That child, Ella went crazy and took off to Thailand where she disappeared. The search has been called off after several years, but the architect (who never met the child and who is still pissed the adoptive parents cut off all contact with her) is now obsessed with finding closure. She asks Elena, the daughter of another former friend with whom she has lost touch and who had recently died to come to Paris, review the diaries of the disappeared girl that had ended up with her, and to use them to write a narrative that answers the open questions. Said daughter has lost her ever loving mind so she abandons her doctoral studies and her excellent boyfriend Z and decamps to Paris to do this absurd thing. She immerses herself in the diaries and merges her identity with Ella's. She writes the narrative, and though she never seems to leave her apartment in the 17th she apparently becomes French.

The second problem is Ella. She is awful. Maybe she is mentally ill, but its not presented that way until the end (its pretty clear that she was having mental health issues at the end of the diary.) She is needy and demanding and has no self-esteem - its an ugly combination. I have known girls like that. It never ends well for them, and perhaps it should not. I get that she was thrown by learning about her parentage, but nothing she does in response makes any sense, She actually made me feel bad for the awful toxic gaslighting guy she was stalking, and that sucks because Seb was the worst.

The third problem was Elena. She was mourning her mother, and had lost her memory of her mother's death and several months following. Again, it was hard to be her, and I understand that anything that offered an escape was appealing. Bur she acted without regard for her father or her boyfriend who were also hurting. She was just "seeya!" And then she developed a creepy obsession with a sick dead girl who wrote godawful poetry and followed slavishly after boys who clearly had no interest in her. She was in Paris, for months, holed up in an apartment doing nothing and seeing no one. This is not a person I want to know.

The writing was good, and there were some really beautiful passages, but an absurd premise and off-putting and dull characters, and did I mention the terrible poetry, all add up to a not very good book. My attachment to Thailand and seeker types kept me pretty interested for a while and the pretty writing helped. I did not dislike this, and I will be interested to see what Amanda Dennis writes next.… (altro)

Elena meets her Mother’s long ago friend in Paris who offers her an apartment and job. The job is to find what happened to Ella by reading and re writing her journals . Ella has gone missing in Thailand but has left behind journals. Elena and Ella have never met, but Elena tries to get into Ella’s head by reading and writing what she thinks happened. Elena also worries about her own mental state while taking on this project as her Mother had mental issues and Elena is losing periods of time.
Very detailed novel.
Many thanks to Bellevue press and Netgalley for an opportunity to read.
I can only give 3 stars as I wasn’t wowed by this novel.… (altro)

This is a hard novel to describe. It's set in Paris, where Elena has been hired by a friend of her dead mother to fictionalize her missing daughter's journals. But it's really set in northern Thailand, which is where the missing woman, Ella, had been teaching English before she disappeared, but those parts of the novel, while they are far more vivid and detailed than the "real" parts, are just Elena's imagining what Ella's life was like. And while Ella's life was a mess; she'd fallen for a self-involved and self-congratulatory American, her housemate had some serious emotional issues going on and her own issues made teaching difficult, at least Ella was out there living her life. Elena was busy not living hers, using this temporary job as a way to leave her long-term boyfriend behind as well as her graduate studies. She may be living in Paris, but she's treading water, hoping that by immersing herself in Ella's story, she'll find the way back into her own.

I was wary going into this one as it felt too insubstantial given that all Elena does is wander around moodily, but her imagining of Ella's life is vivid and takes up the majority of the book. And, to give Elena credit, she chose the right place to be aimless. I wouldn't mind being aimless in a rent-free apartment in Montmartre. I liked the meta touches in this novel, too, the way the reader is reminded that Elena is making things up, that she's writing for a specific person and that she is ignorant of most of the facts. But what else is fiction, but someone making stuff up in the absence of fact, embroidering on ideas and fragments? This is an off-beat kind of book that won't appeal to everyone, but there's something interesting going on here.… (altro)