The Paper Palace (Reese's Book Club): A Novel
REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE THE PAPER PALACE IS: "Filled with secrets, love, lies and a summer beach house. What more could you ask?"--Parade "A deeply emotional love story...the unraveling of secrets, lies and a very complex love triangle." --Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club July '21 Pick)
"Nail-biting." --Town & Country "A magnificent page-turner." --Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author "[An] irresistible placement of a complicated family in a bewitching place." --The New York Times A story of summer, secrets, love, and lies: in the course of a singular day on Cape Cod, one woman must make a life-changing decision that has been brewing for decades. "This house, this place, knows all my secrets."
It is a perfect August morning, and Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace"--the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn't forever changed the course of their lives. As Heller colors in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity. Tender yet devastating, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes and misdemeanors of families.
"Nail-biting." --Town & Country "A magnificent page-turner." --Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author "[An] irresistible placement of a complicated family in a bewitching place." --The New York Times A story of summer, secrets, love, and lies: in the course of a singular day on Cape Cod, one woman must make a life-changing decision that has been brewing for decades. "This house, this place, knows all my secrets."
It is a perfect August morning, and Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace"--the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn't forever changed the course of their lives. As Heller colors in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity. Tender yet devastating, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes and misdemeanors of families.
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Community Reviews
This book was a little confusing with the way it jumped around in time. It was also a bit triggering for me personally with talking about sexual assault, etc… other than that it was a great read!
"Does letting go mean losing everything you have, or does it mean gaining everything you never had?"
OMG, this book... I wish I had known about the triggers in it before I started.
There's a lot of trauma; multi-generational sexual assault and rape, pretty much right of the bat. Heller has a knack for bludgeoning you with trauma (not just the sexual assault; toxic step parent relationships, self-loathing, death, adultery, etc.) almost half to death and just as you get good and squirmy with it, she throws in some humour that draws you back in -- expect a lot of that. I was all over the place between liking and hating this book. While I have strong feelings about infidelity, I can certainly understand the complicated nature of being caught between the comfort of an old familiar and easy relationship that never had the chance to grow and a newer relationship that somehow feels like a strange combination of perfect-fit and unsatisfying. I really loved the relationships between Elle and her sister Ana, Elle and Peter (he is funny, well-read, good with kids and mothers-in-law, and had a British accent; what more could you want in a husband?), and Elle and Jonas (for the most part). They were so relatable with their iterations of complicated love. Also, I got very nostalgic for the days when I was a kid and we used to visit my stepfather's family cottage in Vermont.
"Nice is the enemy of interesting."
In the end, I think I enjoyed more than I was uncomfortable with.
Should have had a trigger warning ⚠️
some very heavy/sensitive topics
But the imagery was so good I still can still see myself there on the beach with all the characters. This book lives rent free in my head.
The book description was very misleading! I was expecting a book about two childhood friends who realized they always loved each other and got… this
This is the worst book of 2024 and quite possibly the worst book I have ever read. I don’t think I could hate a book more.
To begin, the descriptiveness of everything was so utterly, astoundingly awful and unnecessary. There’s creating a space and then there is drowning in one🚫 and I could really do without the 17 divorces (exaggeration, but who could really keep count) that served no purpose.
Not a single character was enjoyable. Not ONE. All completely crappy people. Wallace was a mother who should have never been a mother and was truly a disgusting person. The main character had no adoring qualities. Though the entire book was based off this “love” for Jonas, he was hardly described other than her having 2 minutes of sex with him. There were so many characters and for no point at all.
I can’t even begin to speak about the brevity of sex-and not in a good way-the author writes about. It was disturbing. The way it was described and talked about was seriously bothersome- and that doesn’t even include the child molestation, rape, or incest.
The set up of the book was just as terrible as everything else. 385 pages for one day? Unnecessary. Breaking the day up every 10 minutes? Not crucial to the storytelling. And the endless abyss of one off stories that didn’t even pertain to, what I assume to be, the main point of the story? This book could have been 100 pages and it still would’ve been too long. The ending? No point at all.
If you’re still reading this, don’t read this book.
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