I couldn't resist the title and picked it up thinking it would be a surefire Pettigrew Award winner - frustrated wild child leaves America to spend a year in Paris, courtesy of an eccentric uncle, to spread her wings and find out what life has to offer, all told in a witty, intellectualized fashion.
Well, it's entertaining up to a point and I got to the end without too much of a slog but it wasn't what I was expecting. Perhaps I expected a wild, yet naive narrator but found no innocent abroad here - in one of the opening chapters our heroine chats to a male friend at a pretty outdoor Parisian cafe, having accidentally stood up her married lover.
So far, so slightly racy Pettigrew. Then she announces, dear reader, that she's just come under the table. The novel was written in the 1950s so, whilst unabashardly modern and all that, this incongrousness haunts the novel. The unlikely plot twists and turns and a host of unsympathetic characters - including the heroine - all left me rather cold.
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