Translated from the French.
"Katherine Pancol is one of France's best known contemporary authors. [This book] was a huge success in France,where it won the Prix de Maison de la Presse for best novel of the year."
Well……C'est intéressant. While fun to read, this novel is zuzu, meaning light and easy. Which is fine. I thought it was going to be a novel about Africa, but it's a novel about Parisian women and their kids with a few male characters here and there.
Lots of marital straying and mistresses and boyfriends and women doing fine on their own…ultimately.
Josephine's feckless, unemployed husband Antoine leaves her and takes up with Mylene and they move to Kenya where Antoine manages a crocodile farm owned by the Chinese. This is the jump off the high dive that forces Josephine to take charge…to sink or swim. What is to happen to her now? She has become a bit frumpy and her work and interests are all about 12th century Medievalists? "She aced exams but couldn't be trusted with eyeliner." Her father died when she was ten years old and Josephine was left with a mother who always found fault with her.
Jo has a fashionable flighty sister, Iris, married to a rich man. She has two children: snotty beautiful Hortense and chubby sweet Zoe. She has a neighbor Shirley with a mysterious past and a teenage son. Her mother has remarried a man named Marcel; he is also rich, but overweight and out of shape, yet HIS mistress, Josiane, loves him just the way he is……and on and on.
This is mostly Josephine's story, but these other characters support her and the novel….You could almost read it in a night.
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