Just Finished Reading The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown

The Light of Paris is a 2016 novel by Eleanor Brown, who achieved success in 2011 with her debut book The Weird Sisters. I found this story, as I often do with my reading, by randomly browsing my local public library's shelves...maybe I'd be better off being more selective...

Madeleine lives in 1999 as the wife of a wealthy businessman who is constantly berating and belittling her and her artistic interests.  She feels unappreciated and trapped, and her mother is equally critical of her, siding with the jerk of a husband.  One day Madeleine is going through her mother's attic and comes across a journal that her grandmother, Margie, had written about her own outlook and experiences.  Becoming engrossed in it, she feels a bond with her grandmother...who also had her own difficulties with people who refused to respect her as a viable individual with her own aspirations and talents.  The book then toggles with each succeeding chapter back and forth between Margie in 1924 and Madeleine in 1999 as they try to sort out their respective lives in the face of all those mean, selfish people who either don't understand them or don't care about them...or both...

Overall, I didn't have a very positive reaction to Brown's book.  I took in consideration the fact that her story is of two women, separated by two generations and 75 years, and who tend to both be excessively self-absorbed and self-pitying and wondered whether my own gender may account for a built-in bias against it.  But I think not...I am a man, but can remember many times in my life when I was belittled and bullied by others and not given the elemental degree of respect that any intelligent being on this planet deserves.  The problem with the people surrounding Madeleine and Margie is that they imposed their own models of what the two should be like on them, inevitably being repeatedly disappointed when they behaved as only their true selves, unrecognized or denied by others, would naturally behave.  As Madeleine and Margie each finally display their own assertiveness, they discover that there are others in the world who will accept them for who they are, and this revolutionizes their lives.  That's a good message, but the author could well have done without this massive self-pity party of a story in expressing it...

Incidentally, as to the novel's title, Paris is a recurring theme, real or figurative, of a place to escape to discover one's true self and be able to freely engage in creative expression, and it filtered throughout the book...