Blame It on Paris

by Laura Florand

Overview

Can an insecure American woman find happiness with a sexy Parisian waiter—-
even if she doesn't like the French?

Laura has spent most of her adult life avoiding serious relationships, flitting around the world, and keeping her romantic expectations comfortably low. The last thing she wants is to have her globe-trotting ways curtailed by a messy emotional entanglement. As far as she's concerned, chocolate is just as satisfying as true love—and a lot less complicated.
So how, in the name of all that is romantic, has she managed to get involved with a dangerously charming Frenchman named Sébastien? And only weeks before she's scheduled to leave Paris for good?
Everyone knows that Frenchmen are chain-smoking, manic-depressive, faithless, male chauvinistic, perfectionist snobs. What's worse, they live in France.
The cultural differences alone are enough to kill any relationship, even if Laura wanted one. She's from small-town Georgia. He's a sophisticated Parisian. They go together like grits and escargot.
But Sébastien isn't just any Frenchman. He's a gorgeous, sweet, sexy, graphic artist who seems to find Laura adorable for reasons she can't begin to comprehend. As the days slip by, she's finding it harder and harder to say adieu.
Unless she comes to her senses soon, she could end up ruining her life with a beautiful romance. . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765315083
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/03/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

A Fulbright Scholar, Laura Florand has lived in France, Spain, and French Polynesia. For the past several years, she has divided her time between France and the United States. She currently teaches French at Duke University in North Carolina.
In real life she married Sébastien Florand four times in 2002. The number of ceremonies made everyone else think she was crazy but made her French in-laws quite happy.
Laura Florand has reviewed restaurants for Time Out Paris and has published articles on her travel experiences with various publications, including Travelers' Tales and Transitions Abroad. A former journalist, she has a string of feature articles to her credit, as well as poetry, short stories, scholarly articles, and translations.
She frequently publicizes departmental events to local papers and is responsible for the marketing of her Polynesian dance group, a popular performance group in North Carolina.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Eleven o’clock on a Friday night. The seamy, sex-obsessed center of Paris. I balanced over a Turkish toilet in a tiny bistro, one stiletto heel propped against the wall to make some kind of writing table out of my knee, trying desperately not to touch anything around me as I wrote an invitation to my dorm’s next student party. And I used to imagine a life of foreign adventure as so romantic.

 

Okay, so it’s not that this wasn’t romantic, in its way; but heretofore, tottering over a reeking hole in the floor of a two-foot-square room had not been part of my vision of romance. Before I moved to Paris as a graduate student, it had not even been part of my vision of possible ends to the digestive process. In my hometown, in Georgia, women didn’t have a digestive process; we only used the ladies’ room to freshen up. Highly refined women used the “little girls’ room,” but that was why I had fled the country. The mind could only take so much before it cracked.

 

How, with this upbringing, had I sunk to writing an invitation to a strange man while trying to avoid falling into merde? Two possible explanations offered themselves: either I was desperate, or it was all somebody else’s fault. I couldn’t possibly be desperate, so I figured I should blame it on Paris.

 

 

Paris and I, well, we just weren’t hitting it off. Maybe she’d been oversold, or my attitude had been affected by my first month, during which I cried myself to sleep every night over a necessary breakup the move to Paris had facilitated.

 

“Maybe I’m just not meant for a big city full of French,” I told my sister Anna on the phone.

 

“You have to like Paris,” she said. “Everybody loves Paris. You have a moral responsibility to love Paris. What is wrong with you?” It’s amazing how many conversations I have where that question comes up.

 

“It’s got an awful lot of French people in it. A disconcerting amount, really. I read about that in Mark Twain, but you don’t really appreciate the impact until you’re here. Do you know I scare people?”

 

My sister choked. At five-foot-three, I rarely evoke terror until people get to know me better. “Well, you scare me,” she said, proving my point. “But I’m kind of surprised you’re having this effect at first sight. What do you do? Wear white tennis shoes?”

 

Okay, I just want to point out here that my sister thinks white Keds are stylish. Any comments from her to a woman who had just bought a pair of black stiletto boots were way out of line. True, I’d only bought black stiletto boots because I couldn’t find any other kind of boots in Paris, but at least I owned some. “I smile.”

 

She burst out laughing.

 

“I’m not kidding! Today an older woman actually jumped back and put up her umbrella to ward me off. I was just being friendly.” Not being raised in a barn, I tended to nod and smile at anyone whose path I crossed. This provoked surprisingly panicked reactions in Parisians, as if they thought I was insane.

 

On the other end of the line came lots of choking sounds, as if my sister were coughing up a hairball. This is possible. She has lots of long curly blond hair, and when we were little one of our brother’s friends mistook her for a poodle. Really. I wouldn’t mention it, but she was mocking my pain. “Sorry,” she said, finally spitting out the fur. “I really shouldn’t talk to you while I’m eating. Any other woes you want to tell me about today besides terrifying old ladies?”

 

I pulled the phone far enough away from my ear to glare at it, my phone card clicked down to its last unit, and we lost the connection. I stepped out of the phone booth, past a waiting fellow student who gave me an intolerant look for talking so long, and looked around at the Cité U, my home sweet home. The Cité Universitaire is a giant collection of student dorms on the south side of Paris, across from the Parc Montsouris, the only park in all of Paris that rambles instead of following classical geometry. Evening was settling in, and students traipsed to and from their various houses and the main building, where our student status qualified us to eat very bad food for very little money. I had a credit card and planned to win the lottery in a few years to pay it off, so I didn’t take advantage of this privilege nearly as much as I should have.

 

Aside from the food, I loved the Cité Universitaire, with its vast parklike grounds and its thirty-seven different houses sponsored by thirty-seven different countries. I liked to walk past the fields of students playing soccer, the students chatting each other up, the men pretending they were students to try to hit on young women, and study the houses each country had built. We had everything from a sedate neo-Gothic to something that strongly resembled a bomb shelter. As the architecture suggested, the place hosted a lot of oddball cultures: French, Moroccan, Danish, Canadian. There were even some Americans who, taken out of their element, are about the strangest creatures on the globe. I tried to hang out with them at first, but when they caught me speaking French with the natives, they considered me a snob and a traitor to class, country, and above all, language, and pelted me with the half-eaten pastries they always had in one hand. Okay, I made that up about being pelted with pastries. Still, no Europeans ever nibbled on delicious pastries in the Métro. How come I was the only American who noticed, realized eating in public was considered barbaric here, and stopped doing it? I’m rarely considered a paragon of perception and sensitivity to others, so come on, how hard could it be?

 

Anyway, rumors of roaches surrounded the Fondation des États-Unis, so I ended up living in the Maison du Canada. There, students also tended to hang out in large groups dissing the French, but at least we did it in French, so those obnoxious Frenchmen could understand us. The Canadian house made me pay extra rent to live there, though, which was downright rude. Did they have any idea how much of my tax money went to pay for their nuclear shield or to subsidize businesses that destroyed their ozone layer?

 

I hadn’t figured out how to make calls from my room yet, mostly because it involved putting down a hard cash deposit, and I had spent my last bit of cash at a really nice chocolate shop that didn’t take credit cards. My sister could call in, though, and a week or so later she caught me, huddled under my rough, orange, dorm-issue blanket, clutching my teddy bear for warmth. The dorm hadn’t turned the radiators on yet; for some reason they thought it didn’t get cold enough until November. “Where have you been?” she said. “Did some old lady stab you with an umbrella? I was starting to worry.”

 

“No! I’ve been trying to enjoy this stupid city. Do you know I’ve got an art history professor card that lets me go into the Louvre anytime I want? For free! Three-hour lines of tourists circling around the Pyramide, and I just wave my card at a guard in the Cardinal Richelieu gallery and waltz right in. It’s like having my own secret entrance to the Bat Cave, only better because there is cooler stuff inside.”

 

“But you’re not an art history professor,” Anna pointed out. “You don’t know anything about art.”

 

“I wish you wouldn’t get caught up in the details. Valérie gave it to me.

Editorial Reviews

A fabulous romp from Paris to Podunk and back again. Loved it. Laura Florand's reluctant heroine is adorable, and her perfect Parisian amour can wait on my table anytime.” —Haywood Smith, New York Times bestselling author of the Red Hat Club series on Blame It on Paris

“Laura Florand offers up an outsider's oddly inside view of Paris, and she does so in a narrative that is by turns witty and touching, but always charming. Best of all, she turns the tables and lets us see our own culture through the fresh, French eyes of the man she loves. Do yourself a favor: Read this book.” —Joshilyn Jackson, author of Gods in Alabama on Blame It on Paris

“A romantic, hilarious souffle of a story! Move over, Bridget Jones. Charming and laugh-out-loud funny.” —Deborah Smith, New York Times bestselling author of A Place to Call Home on Blame It on Paris

“This delightful book should come with a warning label: do not read while traveling, otherwise other passengers will wonder why you keep laughing aloud and shouting ‘Vive la Laura Florand!'” —Cassandra King, author of The Sunday Wife on Blame It on Paris

“I was taught in high school chemistry never to combine two ingredients whose properties you don't fully understand. Well, Laura Florand ignored that advice and mixed a Parisian gentleman with a Southern lady, and what she got, predictably, was combustible. Blame It on Paris is a charming, light-hearted romp through a cross-cultural quagmire that proves that love, if it can't conquer all, certainly is a match for a couple with families at different ends of the universe.” —Larry Habegger, editor, Travelers' Tales Paris

From the Publisher

A romantic, hilarious souffle of a story! Move over, Bridget Jones. Charming and laugh-out-loud funny.

New York Times bestselling author of A Place to Ca Deborah Smith

A fabulous romp from Paris to Podunk and back again. Loved it. Laura Florand's reluctant heroine is adorable, and her perfect Parisian amour can wait on my table anytime.

New York Times bestselling author of the Red Hat C Haywood Smith

Florand's debut novel is the semiautobiographical story of the intercontinental courtship of Laura H- and Sebastien Florand. Laura, in Paris for a year on a Fulbright in 2001, isn't looking for love, but after her friends dare her, she invites to a party the hot bistro waiter she's been salivating over. They, of course, hit it off; Sebastien proves to be suave, romantic and smart, and a talented artist to boot. When Laura's scholarship ends, she returns to America, but unable to bear their separation, she quits her Ph.D. program and returns to Paris to live with Sebastien in an apartment "smaller than most American cars." Clashing cultures-she's from rural Georgia-supply much of the humor; after Laura and Sebastien decide to marry, his extended family flies to Georgia to see the couple wed at her family home, and though the French contingent's reactions to American culture-no wine on Sundays?- are funny, preparations for the epic French village wedding are much more interesting. The lovers' quarrels, however, are tedious, and Florand's lengthy descriptions of the vast spools of red tape the couple encounter while trying to secure work permits and visas seem extraneous in this frothy French confection of a novel. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The course of true love runs snoozily smoothly between an American woman and a Frenchman. Cite Universitaire grad student Laura claims to hate her new hometown-which is weird, since she also says that life in Paris is wonderful. She loves the classes she takes and the grassy campus they're held on; she's amassed a supportive group of international friends; and she is quickly becoming a bona-fide gastronome, sampling divine French chocolates at every opportunity. While dining one night at her favorite bistro, Laura takes note of an attractive French waiter. Though she assumes he's unattainable, she leaves him her number and an invitation to a party. Much to her surprise, he calls, and the two begin a whirlwind romance. The early bumps in Laura and Sebastien's relationship are relatively insignificant: He quickly wants to call her his girlfriend while she still isn't sure, his friends talk about his ex-girlfriends, etc. The more time they spend together, the more Laura realizes that her waiter crush could turn serious. She delays her departure from Paris for several months, but eventually must return to Georgia. Despite the distance, their love flourishes. After several months, Sebastien comes to visit and meet her family; while there, he proposes. Laura loves him, but she's hesitant, worrying that they haven't known each other long enough. More importantly, Sebastien's career options in the States are limited, and she's not sure she wants to move back to France. The couple engage in countless conversations on the subject, make the inevitable compromises and live happily ever after. Epigraphs suggest that this is based on Florand's own life, but real romances this happy-go-lucky tend tobore everyone but the two in question-and this one is no exception. Tensionless, witless and ultimately pointless.

Kirkus Reviews