Review by Booklist Review
Philippe Lambert has always been shadowed by a disturbingly accurate sense of clairvoyance--cursed, according to his mother, by the bullfighting ring buried beneath their Paris flat. Despite his vague, slightly off-putting strangeness, he's become an executive, got married, and fathered two sons. Each year, a new au pair arrives to mind the boys, and Philippe maintains polite distance until 1986, when terrorist bombings batter Paris and the new au pair's arrival awakens his dormant sense of doom. Philippe is compelled to follow her constantly, which tests his sanity, but eventually saves her life. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, a charismatic art school professor takes Marie under her wing, wielding absolute control until Marie is eventually forced to confront her mentor's horrifying objective. Seeking rebirth, Marie takes flight to Paris as Philippe's latest au pair, heralding another disaster as Philippe's desperate stalking renders him increasingly unstable. Paris' streets are a gritty, dangerous constant here as Philippe and Marie's stories converge around a mysterious, cataclysmic event. Dutch art historian and writer Bronwasser's sensual, beautifully written story has genre-stretching appeal.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Characters collide, bombs explode, and lives shatter in Dutch art critic Bronwasser's arresting and kaleidoscopic English debut, narrated by a middle-aged woman named Marie. At the heart of the novel is her intense relationship with charismatic photography professor Flo da Silva, whom Marie met as a 19-year-old college student in the Netherlands and fell out with after a catastrophic betrayal. Before diving into the details of what went wrong, Marie flashes forward to recall her time working as an au pair for Phillip Lambert, a largely unremarkable bourgeois Parisian patriarch--save for his strange psychic gifts--whom Marie meets after things end badly with Flo. Eventually, Bronwasser's sinuous narratives converge in contemporary Paris, leading to a (literally) explosive denouement. When it comes to genre necessities like heightening suspense and converting unanswered questions into narrative momentum, Bronwasser delivers the goods, but her approach can feel roundabout, even leisurely, as she trains her eye on larger questions about power disparities, the ethics of contemporary art, and the nature of fate. Dubious readers, rest assured: everything comes together perfectly, like Paris's 12 avenues intersecting at the Arc de Triomphe. Cannily constructed and gracefully written, this thought-provoking literary thriller offers a charcuterie board's worth of rewards. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Bronwasser's second novel takes a studied look at how "the banal and the exceptional" interact in the lives of three relative strangers. Although the author insists that "every story rests on three points," two of her three linchpins never meet. Florence da Silva teaches photography at an unnamed university in the Netherlands, traveling to Paris only briefly when her rising fame demands it. Damaged middle manager Philippe Lambert, on the other hand, rarely leaves the city, even though his wife, Laurence, who works for Air France, travels the Continent extensively. Marie, their point of intersection, comes to Paris from the Netherlands after a shocking betrayal leads her to bury herself in the daily drudgery of work as an au pair. If Flo has taught Marie anything, it's the difference between looking and seeing, and through her eyes, the reader discovers a Paris seldom visible. Scuttling back and forth between Philippe's cramped apartment in the banlieue and her dreary servant's room on the eighth floor of the building housing his parents' spacious flat, she rides the Metro underneath the Champs-Élysées, attends language class near the Sorbonne, and walks Philippe and Laurence's two children in the park, always adjacent to but never quite able to access the City of Light. Beneath Bronwasser's tight narrative beats the drum of a sinister force that surfaces in the attacks that rock the city periodically between 1986 and 2015. More terrifying than anything the terrorists can concoct is the pain people can inflict on each other, whether from deliberate malice, toxic indifference, or horribly bungled efforts to forge a misguided connection. Between the banal and the extraordinary, the banal wins by a mile. Bronwasser makes the banal exceptional with an eye that not only looks but sees. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
