Review: The Paris Wife, Paula McLain

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill-prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

Paula McLain received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996, and has since been a writer-in-residence at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and The Ucross Foundation Residency Program, and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Individual poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including the Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine. As well as teaching part-time at John Carroll University, she is a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College

I have had this book on my e-reader for over a year. I bought it in a sale because of the pretty cover combined with the interesting setting of Paris in the 20's.
The first fifty pages do not really pull me in though. I do not really connect with Hadley. I do not understand her motives and am not really sure if she is honest. This did not get better in the rest of the book. Both Hemingway's and Hadley's decisions and actions did not feel realistic with the thoughts they where having. I did finish the book. I read Z by Theresa Anne Fowler right before and was curious how the situations described in that book would work out in this one as the stories touch at some point. I am not sure if I would have continued reading if that was not the case. Still it is clear that the book has been thoroughly researched.

The Paris Wife
Author: Paula McClain
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages: 329
Format: eBook
ISBN-10: 0345521323
ISBN-13: 9780345521323
Ballantine Books: eBook | Hardcover | Audiobook

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