The Paper Palace

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller

Fiction

2021 Penguin Random House Audio

Narrated by Nan McNamara

Finished on March 20, 2022

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace" -- the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside.

Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn't forever changed the course of their lives.

As Heller colors in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity. Tender yet devastating, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes and misdemeanors of families.

I really wanted to love this one, especially since it's a favorite with so many of my friends (a few gave it a 5-star rating on Goodreads), but I found Elle such an annoying and unlikeable character that I was tempted to stop listening to the audio after the first chapter. I went back to Goodreads to see why this debut novel was such a popular read and noticed a few remarks about the ambiguous finale. Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to continue in order to see what all the fuss was about. The further I got into the story, the more I began to like it. The atmospheric setting of Cape Cod and the family camp in the Back Woods are easy to envision: neighborhood cookouts and cocktail parties, swimming at the pond, picnics at the beach, musty cabins filled with spiders and mouse droppings, and the incessant presence of mosquitoes. However, hidden in the shadows of the past lurk family secrets and lies known only to a few. There are several disturbing scenes involving the loss of innocence (I'm being purposely vague here so as not to reveal any spoilers), which I might have skipped over had I read the print edition. Overall, The Paper Palace turned out to be a decent read, and Nan McNamara does a fine job with the narration, but don't look for it on my Top Ten list.

I received a complimentary copy from Libro.fm. All thoughts and opinions are my own.