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Customer Reviews of The Last Time I Saw Paris

So Real
I cannot recommend Elizabeth Adler's THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS highly enough. I loved it! She makes it all so real, and brings Paris with its restaurants, cafes, bars, shops, museums to such large life, I wanted to be there, and in magical Provence and the Cote d'Azur. In this book, I could almost smell the lavender and rosemary and the sea. Elizabeth Adler also drew me into the love story of Lara and Dan, as well as Lara's search for the woman she feels she has "lost somewhere on the road of life". ( a road whose emotions many woman will idenify with). She does this on an intimate, sensual level, expressing Lara's doubts and fears as well as the new pleasures her younger lover,Dan,brings to her life. It's a MUST read!

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A disappointed effort, 2 1/2 stars, really...
I bought and read this book on a whim, as it is out of the usual realm of fiction that I read, but it came highly recommended and so I gave it a try. At first, the novel held my attention. I read the first 100 pages in one sitting and enjoyed them. The plot line was interesting...woman turns 45, discovers husband has taken lover, and so she seeks comfort in the strong and sexy arms of her 32 year old deck repairman. Simple enough, but still believable. It was in the next 200 hundred pages, that the book lost me. The protagonist, Lara, and her new, younger lover, Dan, take off to Paris, and for Lara, this is the much dreamed about 2nd Honeymoon that she had taken a year to plan for her husband and herself. Lara and Dan find themsleves visiting many of the old haunts of the original honeymoon, without Dan's knowledge of this fact, and much to the misery of Lara. Simply stated, this book read like a tour guide to France, and as someone who hasn't had the pleasure to visit the country, it couldn't hold my attention. I found myslef skimming many of the overbearing details, much too many in French BTW, just to get to the basic plot line. In my opinion, if the author had just stuck with writing a work of fiction instead of trying to weave so many details of the places AND people AND food that she encountered while in France, I could have given this book a much higher rating. Instead, I felt like at least 1/4 of it was spent discussing French food and wine, while another 1/4 discribed the French countryside.

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So much potential, so little fulfillment.
I love Europe. I love reading about Europe. I love stories that take place in Europe with vivid descriptions and lively characters and funny anecdotes. This book promised all this and more. Unfortunately, it didn't deliver. Instead, it is a stilted recounting of somebody's road trip. It could take place anywhere in the world or nowhere at all. The descriptions of towns and countrysides are two dimensional and boring, characters are stiff and shallow, and supposedly funny anecdotes are stilted and forced. The whole thing comes off like reading a really dry travel book. So, if you want vivid, colorful descriptions of lovely French towns and hilarious tales of travel gone awry, try a Rick Steves' travel book. If you want a passionate romantic tale, try any number of romance writers. But whatever you do, don't waste your money on this one. Thank goodness I checked my copy out at the library.