What do You think about The Way I Found Her (1999)?
A precocious 13-year-old boy narrates this story, set in and evocative of Paris. It’s a fabric of exotic and interesting characters and ideas, involving a Russian woman writer of medieval romance novels--written in French--that the boy's mother is translating into English. There is some Existentialism, a suspicion of plagiarism, and a kidnapping. Of course the boy is obsessed with the woman writer(a standard middle-aged woman author fantasy?). Some of it borders on implausible, though it's mostly entertaining. Absorbing in its first half, to my taste it took way too many pages to get to where it was going.
—Martin
Set in Paris, it is a beautiful kind of reverse Lolita tale of a young boy falling in love with an older woman. He spends his summer in an attic of a gorgeous apartment in Paris, learning the language by reading Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment in French, and walking around the city on his own as his mother translates books for their host, Valentina. Dramatic, touching, and full of beautiful sorrow, this is a book to remember. Like the literary equivalent to 'Some Velvet Morning' by Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood.
—Kym
I loved the writing and the theme of early adolescent lust for an older woman, coupled with alienation from one's parents. Of course, I'd like to think that, when I was just about to turn 14, I had Lewis Little's preternaturally adult responses to the grown-up world of sex, work, duplicity, and depravity. Needless to say, I didn't have his courage, but what straight 14-year-old boy doesn't have fantasies of saving an older, voluptuous damsel in distress [while simultaneously discovering his own inner existentialist as well]?
—Lawrence A
