I love that I can get all these great e-books from my library. The Paris Wife was a book that had been on the bottom of my book list for a while. I had heard of it, mainly in title only, but seen it come up on the best sellers list and have lots of good reviews. However I didn't really know much about the actual story. The cost of buying the book had put me off from reading it sooner. I'm so glad it was on the list of e-books that the library had otherwise I might have missed out on this excellent book!
Book Summary (From Amazon): A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.
A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.
Book Review: I loved this book, absolutely 5 stars in my book. I had no idea about the story of Earnest Hemingway, I only knew that he was a famous author. One of the really interesting things about this book was that it was a fiction book, but was heavily based on true stories and documentation but obviously part of the book was fictitious. It just felt so real thought, throughout the whole book I felt as if it really was his wife that was writing her side of the story, everything was so vivid and the emotion felt completely real. It was amazing the level of details that the author provides about that era, it felt as if I had been transported into the 1920s along with them.
What was also amazing was to read about the struggles of both Hadley to be a supportive wife and then what Ernest Hemingway went through as an author. She stood by him through everything to be this loyal and supportive wife and to see the way that he sometimes treated her, it brought such emotion, you really felt for her, which I think is the sign of a good book when you are able to feel the emotion of the character you are reading about.
This book absolutely deserves a place on the NY Times Best Seller List for good reason. For me I enjoyed reading about the era, and the true stories and lives of Ernest Hemingway and the circle of his friends that was introduced in the book.
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