Madeleine has always felt like a failure: She’s the one whose expression ruins sorority photos, the person at parties who would rather be at home reading, the old maid at the age of thirty. Spending her entire life trying to fit in has only left her looking like she has everything, but feeling like she has nothing. And when her marriage to controlling, critical Phillip is threatened, Madeleine panics. But when she discovers a journal detailing her grandmother’s wild, romantic summer in Jazz Age Paris, she begins to wonder if there is more to life than playing by someone else’s rules.
Madeleine has always thought her grandmother was exactly like her mother, and like the woman she was supposed to be—stiff, formal, elegant, untouchable. But reading the journal introduces Madeleine to a woman she never knew: a dreamy writer who defied her staid family’s expectations and spent an exhilarating summer in Paris in 1924, writing in cafés, finding work at the American library, and falling in love with a dashing young artist. Inspired by her grandmother’s story, and floored by a long-kept secret she finds in its pages, Madeleine begins to create her own Parisian summer on a visit to her mother back in her old hometown—rediscovering her love of painting, cultivating a vibrant circle of creative friends, and falling into a relationship with a down-to-earth chef who feeds her chocolate, encourages her to be true to herself, and makes her question the miserable perfection of her marriage and her life.
