I struggled with this one a lot more than I thought I would. I love Paris, and lived the city for a few years, so I’m always eager to read books set there. But this one fell short for me, particularly in its reliance on clichés of the city.

The Paris Hours takes place over the course of one day in 1927 (with flashbacks sprinkles in). It follows four different characters from different walks of life: a maid, an artist, a journalist, and a puppeteer. All of them came to Paris from elsewhere—both around France and in one case Armenia—to make a new life in the city. Throughout this day, you see the city through their eyes as they each try to solve a different problem that they have. This alone would have sold me on the book.

However, each chapter comes with the name-dropping of the famous people living in Paris in 1927: Picasso, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Maurice Ravel, Marcel Proust...the list goes on. Alex George states in his author’s note that he wanted to focus on the lives of real people in the city, not those of the celebrities that lived at the same time. So then why are these characters such prominent secondary characters?! Why couldn’t we just have a novel about the lives of these four main people without all the celebrity sprinkled in? The book would have been a lot more powerful that way. Instead, it read as yet another stereotypical novel written by a foreigner about France.

I think many might appreciate this way of storytelling, but for me it fell short with its heavy-handedness.

2.5 stars, rounded up

TW: death of a family member; death of a child; relatively graphic scene of a death