Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

From the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, Paris Metro is a story of East meets West. Kit, a reporter, has spent several years after 9/11 living in the Middle East, working as a correspondent for an American newspaper. Moving between war-torn Baghdad, riots in Beirut, Syria during the Arab Spring, and Greece in the midst of a refugee crisis, she befriends insurgents, fundamentalists and soldiers, diplomats, middlemen, and monks, determined to understand and tell their story. Along the way she falls in love and marries a charismatic Iraqi diplomat named Ahmed before their separation leaves Kit raising their teenage son alone in Paris.

But after the Charlie Hebdo attack occurs and, a few months later, terrorists storm the Bataclan, Kit’s core beliefs are shattered. The violence she had spent years covering abroad is now on her doorstep. What is the point of truth and tolerance when everything is blowing up around you? As Kit struggles with her grief and confusion, she begins to mistrust those closest to her: her friends, her husband, even her own son.

Paris Metro is a taut and propulsive story of two cultures colliding under the same roof; of love, betrayal, and misunderstandings within families; and of the universal quest to find home.

Genres: Fiction, France, Contemporary, Middle East, Audiobook, Adult

371 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 2018

About the author

Wendell Steavenson is an Anglo-American journalist and author, having reported mostly from the Middle East and the Caucasus as a regular contributor for publications such as Guardian, Prospect magazine, Slate, Granta and others. After publishing three non-fiction books, "Paris Metro" is her first novel.

Reviews

[Stephany · Rating 2 out of 5]

***I won this through a goodreads giveaway***

This is a really tough book for me to review. As a whole, this book reads very much like non-fiction. The fact that it covers so much recent history, made this book seem familiar, easier to understand. Steavenson’s writing is so intelligent with beautiful moments of perfectly punctuated thought. I can appreciate this book as a compilation of beautifully written recent history. Where I had trouble with this book is in the characterization. I did not feel particularly attached to or interested in any of the characters. I imagine that being a war correspondent and thus, the things she experienced, would make Kit a very complex person. But I felt like I only ever got to understand her on a surface-level. I felt frustrated when she wasn’t questioning Ahmed more. I wanted to understand her emotions, thoughts. This made it hard for me to connect to their love story. The most beautiful and human moments came from the relationship between Rousse and Little Ahmed. Their interactions, his photography, all that took place during Kit’s time in Kos, were the moments of the book that I was most drawn to. Otherwise, I felt my mind wandering. Intelligent, exquisite writing overall, just a different read than I expected.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://cavebookreviews.blogspot.com/

Wendell Steavenson takes all of our thoughts, impressions, questions, and perceptions about life and death in the Middle East and puts them into a brilliant novel called PARIS METRO.
Kit is a reporter for an American newspaper, and the story covers events from the Iraqi invasion to the Bataclan Club massacre in Paris. Kit narrates the story of her life, the people she loves, and those she meets in her travels.

In 2003, Kit fell in love with Ahmed Solemani in Baghdad. At the time, Ahmed was a fixer for Kit's godfather, Jean, a veteran journalist who managed to get Kit a job and a way into Iraq in the early days of the war. Kit had a British mother and an American father. She grew up traveling the world. Her parents separated when she was very young, and her mother never recovered from the divorce. Kit spent much time with her grandmother in the USA. She didn't know exactly where her father was at any given time. Kit and Ahmed get married but are not always together. They both have jobs that call them away to places where the action is explosive, and a need for people with their skills is needed immediately.

Wendell Steavenson has created a complicated story looking at all sides of the violent crises we have been living with since 9/11. Kit's characterization leads to questions, many of which are unanswerable. She becomes a mother to Ahmed's son, (Little) Ahmed when he is just four. She didn't know he existed until the day his mother died, and he was sent to her husband. Once Kit becomes a mother, things change in her internal world. I think it is that way for many mothers who discover that they must find a way to interpret the world for their children who have questions about everything. The novel is a well-crafted saga of life as a mother of a boy who both loves her and hates her. They do not look alike, do not share cultural or religious values. The boy and his mother are quite the opposite in most ways, and their conflict mirrors the conflict we have facing us in the world today. Who is to blame for all the bloodshed? Who can bring it to an end? These questions make for a typical conversation that Kit's family of friends discuss at dinner, over drinks, after posting stories about the carnage at "Charlie Hebdo."

PARIS METRO is a novel for thinking and examining one's core beliefs. It is a beautiful piece of work about the love for a son and the willingness to do anything for that son. It is a novel that made me question so many things, and I am grateful for WS's work.

Thank you to NetGalley, Wendell Steavenson, and W.W. Norton for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an initial response. The publication date for the novel is in March.

[Tuti · Rating 5 out of 5]

very interesting and timely story, written by an author with lots of insight and first-hand knowledge of both the middle east and present-time paris.
i found the reportage-style writing excellent for this subject, and the complex and intricated structure admirable. it also worked very well on the literary level, there are events we all know and different points of view on them, and there are also characters, and a story building up, and perfectly carved scenes. highly recommended.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was not what I thought it was going to be, and I haven't yet decided if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Admittedly, I gravitated towards it because it said "PARIS" on the cover, but the jacket description intrigued me--however it wasn't the most accurate description of the book. I went into it thinking it would focus almost entirely on the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks in Paris. And while we got there eventually, the first 200 pages were about the Iraq war and the Arab spring in Beirut. We got to Paris, and then on to the island of Kos and the boat arrivals of Syrian migrants, and then back to Paris.

The thread throughout was, unfortunately, the narrator's (a journalist) slowly developing Islamophobia. Even though she married an Iraqi and converted to Islam to do so, and adopted his Iraqi son, and is supposed to be neutral as a journalist, she develops a really vitriolic stance on Islam and Muslims (along the far-right rhetoric of "they come here and expect us to live under Sharia!" type garbage), especially after her friend is killed in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Which was something that bothered me: the author invented a person and inserted them into the attack as a victim, which felt gross. It wasn't like there were 300 people killed and this character could've been an anonymous victim; there were only 11 people killed, and only one woman, in real life. It just felt a little too icky for me to have the character's death invented in this specific case, co-opting the actual tragedy.

The overall tone of the book was really somber and depressing, too, obviously, and the narrator was really unlikable (did I mention she screams at a young Muslim, in his own home, "Alhamdulillah and fuck you" at one point?), so reading this felt really unmoored and lonely, like I was being dragged along behind a really awful human being as she navigates some really awful world events. Still, the writing was good, and this was pretty far out of my normal comfort zone of fiction, so I didn't hate it entirely.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a gripping novel, very heavily written in a journalistic style - the author assumes familiarity with the dense complexities of the Middle East, and I struggled to keep up with her. The characters are well-fleshed, very real, and the jet-set exoticism of her circle is seductive, the kind of life I would love to live. As she threads together major events from Iraq to Paris, the characters seem suspended in time, unable to evolve - and Kit, the author, actually seems to devolve, losing empathy and humanity, allowing her hurt and anger to boil over in exactly the way it would her enemies, causing the very acts of hate that victimized her. The solution, gently iterated by several Wise Men figures in the book, is to combat hate with love, an incredibly difficult one to live...

[Adèle Odette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Captivating storyline, complex characters, compelling prose. Wendell Steavenson clearly understands better than most of us the complexities of the Middle Eastern conflict, and what better way to learn about it than through a work of exquisitely worded fiction? I was hooked from beginning to end.

[Camilla Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully structured and timely read written by Wendell Steavenson whose knowledge of journalism, current affairs and the Middle East shines through on every page. An interesting mélange of fact and fiction, Arabic and French - I would highly recommend this novel to anyone with an interest in the Middle East and the recent attacks by Islamist extremists in France (the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan massacre). A novel that asks many questions through the mouthpiece of its well thought through characters, and makes the reader reevaluate core beliefs - namely that of freedom of speech and to what extent it is defendable even when it is against religious beliefs (“I have the freedom of speech to say what I like, and you have the right to be upset and complain about it”.)

[Paul Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

In “Paris Metro,” Wendell Steavenson weaves a big important novel around the clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the West since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The multi-faceted narrative explains the failing American policy in the northern Middle East by providing historical and cultural context that reveals the naivete of American policy.
The novel draws unsettling conclusions about the futility of American involvement in the region. The US has become just another bad actor in a region filled with duplicitous bad actors. Because the Middle East is a region of brutal authoritarian regimes, pervasive lying has become the universal survival mechanism. Nothing is as it seems—a distorted reality symbolized by the heroine’s charming and beguiling Iraqi husband Ahmed, a character of shifting loyalties. (Steavenson understands the nuts and bolts of Arab autocracies and the destruction of conscience. One might read The Guardian book review of Steavenson’s “The Weight of a Mustard Seed” 17 Jan 2009. An easy Google.)
The trajectory of the novel is from Baghdad in 2003 to Paris of 2015 culminating in the massacres at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices and the Bataclan nightclub. Steavenson limns the dark underside of the clash of civilizations. She delineates the intense difficulties to be expected in trying to assimilate Muslim populations into western societies due to the absolutism intrinsic to the Islamic religion reinforced by long pent up resentments against western imperialism and exploitation. It is Islam’s absolutism more than its fundamentalism which is the stumbling block. The bleak message is that an absolutist rejection of pluralism makes a functional multi-cultural politics impossible—the divide is too great.
The novel is structured through five episodes taking the heroine, a young British-American foreign correspondent, from Baghdad to Beirut to a Greek island (the 2015 migration crisis) interspersed with an intermediate sojourn in Paris followed by final episodes in Paris in 2015.
The novel gains power from characters and dialogue that provide historical and cultural context for understanding the region and its violent convulsions in the wake of the American invasion. Although the characters are architypes, one senses they are the conflation of many actual people the author has met over the years in the Middle East. The reader gains perspective and insight from seeing and hearing characters on all sides of the issues delivering real dialogue in settings that make the experience vivid. The novel is refreshingly devoid of political correctness. The scenes depicted of Islamic radicals in both the Middle East and Europe have the stark feel of the movie “A Most Wanted Man” from the John Le Carré novel.
The novel concludes with a scene symbolizing that reconciliation is possible through improved personal understanding, but this story resolution is a little out-of-step with much of the message that is embedded in the rest of the novel. Another disturbing aspect of the final chapter was the intimation that the US was greatly increasing its support for Syrian Sunni rebel groups and that the US was emulating the Iranian use of militias—sort of a fighting fire with fire approach. On the other hand, turning the heat up on Iran in Syria stresses an Iran that is over-extended. So another chapter of the US odyssey in the Middle East may be about to unfold. Or maybe it’s just the endless war going on forever.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received a copy of this story from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm still digesting this story. The layers and storylines and sides are still a glorious muddle, much like real life. On the one hand, it's a heart-gripping, heart-wrenching story of a journalist trying to sort through the atrocities she's seen, the stories she's heard, the path life has taken. On the other, it's a beautiful introspection on what it means to be a woman, a journalist, a mother, a British-American living in Paris, a Muslim, a friend, and any other number of identities.

The characters are wonderful and unique and flawed, each with their own voice and quirks. I struggled with the historical events in the beginning because I only have a rudimentary working knowledge of what transpired. But I learned a lot as I progressed and as more recent events were portrayed, I felt I had a more concrete understanding of why. Granted, this is fiction. But it does such an amazing job of forcing the reader to consider the other side of any situation. It doesn't ask you to choose a side but instead asks that you look at something through the eyes of your fellow human who you may not agree with.

I couldn't stop reading this. I would happily, even eagerly, read another book by Wendell Steavenson!

I would recommend this book to everyone. Absolutely everyone.

[Michael Malone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enriching story of an American-English reporter in the Middle East, making sense of the madness that surrounds her in Baghdad and Beirut, and then in Paris, where Kit lives when both satire magazine Charlie Hebdo and nightclub the Bataclan are besieged. Kit has married an Iraqi charmer, and later learns he has a son. When her marriage dissolves, she ends up raising Little Ahmed, and we learn, as she does, the challenges of raising an Arab boy in the West.
The narrative gets into gear when Kit and Little Ahmed are together, and the book is hard to put down from this point on.
Paris Metro is an insightful look at parenthood, the reporter's profession and, most significantly, the geopolitical issues of the Middle East, often told through the Iraqis and Syrians and Lebanese, which we don't get a whole lot of here in the U.S.
Loved it.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went back and forth a bit on this one, but I rather appreciated it in the end. Took awhile to get moving, though.

The beginning kinda/sorta sets the scene en media res, during the time of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. We are introduced to middle aged journalist, Kit, and her adopted son, Little Ahmed. But mostly, it just sets the scene for tension.

Back up over a decade, and Kit is in Iraq covering the after-effects of the U.S. invasion. There she meets Ahmed, little Ahmed’s father, who works for the U.N. Ahmed has a unique upbringing for an Iraqi, in that he was raised in DC, as a diplomat’s son, so he had a western education. His father was called back by Saddam Hussein, betrayed and murdered, and thus Ahmed doesn’t have a lot of qualms about the leader’s downfall.

Ahmed, and later his son, are characters who exist between worlds. On the one hand, his western education and especially the betrayal of his family, leads him to want to be secular and even critical of his birth culture. On the other hand, he has a lot of “Arab” coded pride, and deep interest in the issues afflicting Iraq. (Tied into this is he doesn’t necessarily feel respected by “the west”, either.)

I’ll touch more on Little Ahmed’s mentality later, but he entered Kit’s life shortly after Kit married Ahmed. Turns out Ahmed’s first wife wasn’t dead as he claimed, and Ahmed was a bigamist. He shows utter disregard for Kit’s feelings, or any sense of allegiance owed her, when he callously tells her his first wife was killed and he’s going to take the boy from her family.

In all honesty, the Kit/Ahmed relationship made me raise my eyebrow some. I didn’t necessarily feel any emotional attachment between the two, and Ahmed could be distant (emotionally and physically) from the start. Perhaps there’s arguments to be made that Kit chose a man who reminded her of her own father, a journalist adventurer type who abandoned her when she was young. Maybe other readers would say Steavenson eschews swooniness for characters who aren’t into romance, but meh.

Things feel relatively different for Kit and Little Ahmed, who largely live on their own while Papa Ahmed is away traveling (later, he and Kit divorce.) Papa Ahmed wanted his son to have a western lifestyle, which could be a reason he married a western woman with roots in Paris. But for Little Ahmed, he’d always be an Iraqi in his adopted society. The other people in his position would generally be Muslim, even if his father wanted him to stay away from Islam. And Kit, obviously, wasn’t his “real mother.” Beyond ethnic differences, there was something unusual in how Kit treated him: not bad, but not stereotypically maternal, either. She was always on the go, as a journalist, and through their travels it seemed like she always treated him as a “little adult,” too.

But at least by this point, some of the relationships were finally starting to materialize. In the beginning, it felt like Steavenson, a journalist herself who covered conflict zones in the Middle East, was merely spouting off philosophical arguments through characters who were more like mouthpieces. Kit’s evolving response to extremist sects and growing groups of migrants leaving the middle east ultimately became intriguing, and I like the resolution she came to, although it took a dramatic twist. It was much more interesting in the second half of the book, when she could respond to characters like Little Ahmed who were more entrenched and defined.

Ultimately, there was something transcendent about Kit’s relationship with Little Ahmed, and I thought her responses as she covered external events felt authentic. And as a reader who also lives in the world where conflicts and culture clashes between Arabs, westerners and others persist, I appreciated the chance to grapple with the issues. What happens when cultures with different ideas about freedom of speech and fealty to religion come into conflict. Where are the fault lines and hypocrisies when it comes to judging different groups who engage in violence? How easy is it to start over-simplifying the other when it comes to the demands of the news cycle—either as a reporter or as a consumer?

And where is the empathy in all of this? Maybe that’s why, despite the tumultuous ride, I finally came to appreciate Steavenson’s story. She ended on empathy.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

PARIS METRO reads like a fictionalized memoir. It follows an accomplished foreign correspondent covering the conflict in the Middle East, a role Steavenson herself has played through much of her career. A key success of the novel is her ability to conger from her professional experience a strong sense of what that life is actually like. There is constant motion in search of stories with little grounding other than to colleagues and editors. She depicts those colleagues as committed and cosmopolitan professionals with strong—often cynical—worldviews. Success requires cleverness, luck, connections and especially acceptance of the potential for danger. This lifestyle seems to provide little room for a settled family life in the usual sense. Indeed Steavenson gives us a first person fictional narrative with a deeply conflicted protagonist whose personal life is anything but usual. Instead it seems dark and unsatisfying with few unshakeable core values.

The dichotomies between the professional and personal are apparent everywhere. The narrative depicts sectarian conflicts that lead to lawlessness and violence with few easy answers. Her profession leaves Catherine ("Kit") Kittredge with feelings of “contempt, black humor, (and) cynicism.” She reports on insurgents, fundamentalists, soldiers, and politicians but the most intriguing character in the book seems to be her husband, Ahmed. He is an Iraqi whose father was executed by Saddam. He had a son by a previous wife whom he never divorced before marrying Kit, but expects her to embrace. She does. Steavenson depicts Ahmad as a cipher, not unlike the Middle East in general. He may be a diplomat or a terrorist; he may be a fundamentalist or an atheist; he clearly is adept at prevarication and compartmentalization. He frequently expresses a pragmatic view of the conflict that reveals a person who seems ill suited to support Kit in her struggle with self-doubt. Ahmed tells her things like: “Don’t be fooled by crowds. Crowds are easy to buy,” and “Humanity is a luxury; you need prosperity to have humanity.”

The plot follows Kit from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. Along the way she reports on the dissolution of Baghdad, the Arab Spring in Lebanon and Syria, and the refugee crisis on the Greek island of Kos. With a deft internal monologue and conversations with minor characters (Zorro the addicted photojournalist, Rousse the ill-fated illustrator, Alexandre and Jean her “godfathers”, and Little Ahmed her stepson) we witness the shaking of Kit’s core beliefs. Throughout, Steavenson is never tempted to offer easy solutions for either Kit or the Middle East.

Despite its considerable strength, PARIS METRO is not without flaws. The key one seems to derive from the very nature of a reporter’s job—to be an unbiased witness. Kit moves from assignment to assignment giving the narrative an erratic feel. Just when the drama seems to build, Kit moves on to something else, leaving a frustrated reader wondering how the last event was resolved. Another problem stems from Steavenson’s overreliance on philosophical discussions among her characters where little is ever resolved. Most of this does not seem to move the story along in meaningful ways. Despite these shortcomings, the novel is a worthy read.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I waffled in my opinion of this book at least a half a dozen times as the story progressed. Initially, I was charmed by the intelligent writing and the cosmopolitan scenes. Then I was a bit put-off by the patronizing tones and romanticized views of what it’s like to be a western war correspondent. Then I appreciated the deep personal relationship struggles and non traditional family growing pains. Then I felt all of the anger and sorrow of the main protagonist. Then I felt bad for that lapsing into xenophobic sentiments from that same character. Then the resolution sort of brought me back to a main baseline.

Overall, I’d recommend it as a read. The writing is incredibly intelligent and articulate, and there are some plain funny stories whose incredibly specific details (a bush 2000 sticker on an AK, madelines from a gun, digestifs, food, etc) make it clear that the author is drawing from a rich well of personal experience. I’m still uncomfortable with the way it romanticizes the war time experiences in 2003/4. But I appreciate that it’s written from a non-American perspective, because that complicates a lot of the questions around religion, culture, morality, etc. The characters sort of seem like a too-perfect ensemble for the scene, yet at the same time I don’t get nearly enough details about people to feel connected/to see them grow or fall? (E.g. Zorro’s struggles sort of just tacked on in the background).

I’m trying to leave aside that this was written by a journalist, which sort of prejudices me against it to start with because I think journalists to switch to fiction have problems.

Thinking about this time period from where we stand now is interesting though. We grew up with the war on terror and the surge of ISIS, but most Americans were removed from the questions of identity that plagued supposedly liberal, cosmopolitan Europeans. It’s a perspective I certainly knew about, but not in as much detail. This is the true gem of the novel, the relationship between Little Ahmed and his mother, and navigating an impossibly tough time to grow up in France as a child without a firm root of identity.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. For the Joe Chardonnay crowd. Pondering Middle East problems? Take two Thomas Friedmans and a long Economist article, rub chin twice, and pontificate freely while informing everyone in your salon about your most recent trip to, say, Greece or Turkey and the really interesting Iraqi (or Syrian or Yemeni) refugee you met there.

Oh, and but for a genuinely lovely riff about Paris's decline, another book on a list of books about Paris that is, well, not.
*********
"I wrote expat stories for Oz about the Paris that Americans wanted to visit on their vacations. I found the city was largely unchanged since Hemingway had shot himself. It was easy enough to paint a glaze of faded glamour and nostalgia over the city's deliquescent side, because Parisians did. It all looked the same as it did when the Lost Generation had camped there, but now the bistros were staffed by Sudanese reheating magret de canard and poulet chasseur in the microwave, and the accordion players were Romanian beggars. Aspic, petrified, stuck. Nevermind, said Oz, Paris is the etermal city of rose-tinted foreign spectacles; send me Audrey Hepburn, Edith Pilaf, and lilac blooms. Paris was almost a parody of itself: chocolatiers and bonbon vitrines, wrought-iron cafe tables under the horse chestnut trees, red-and-white-checked tablecloths and a carafe of rotgut Brouilly. All the young people had given up and moved to London."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by an international journalist, the protagonist of this excellent novel shares the author's peripatetic occupation. Catherine "Kit" Kittredge is assigned to cover the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. There, she falls in love with her Iraqi translator, the charming Ahmed. They are wary world-wanderers, both of them raised in Europe and America, estranged from family, and highly suspicious of all instututions: religions, governments, the military. Steavenson knows these topics well and does a wonderful job of weaving in her nuanced understanding of Arabic culture, terrorism, immigration, Islamophobia, and other current issues. More than just a novel of ideas, this is also the very tender story of Kit's struggle to raise Ahmed's son, Little Ahmed, in Paris. The elusive and often-absent Ahmed isn’t terribly helpful; instead, she's aided by her ersatz family: her godfather who's an ambassador, her friend Rousse who works at Charlie Hebdo, and a photojournalist friend named Zorro. These and others enigmatic characters enliven this very rich and deeply human world. The wonderful Paris Metro will live inside me for a long time to come.

[Elsa Wolf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to focus in a quiet space to get through this novel. It was not a quick, breezy read. It was well written sectionally, but often felt disjointed or disconnected as a whole, and I had to get used to her technique. It felt more like either creative non-fiction or realistic fiction. Many things are taken straight out of history. There were dozens of unknown words I had to look up or pass over and research later to keep the flow of the story going. My favorite words; postprandial peregrination.
Basically, means a stroll after dinner.

Among many things of a serious nature (Marines on holiday taking down a terrorist in a metro train, Charlie Hebdo attack, terrorists storming the Bataclan). Throughout the book, I found more lighthearted examples of real accounts, such as artist’s mosaic aliens on the sides of buildings in Paris. The topics throughout created an interesting line of discussion in my book group.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is told from the perspective of a British American journalist, Kit, who spends time in Iraq, Lebanon, Greece, and France covering uprisings, wars, terrorist attacks, and the refugee crisis. Along the way she falls in love with and marries an Iraqi man, Ahmed. She is friends with a group of war journalists and photographers who have traveled the world covering crises. This book is a mixture of plot, mostly centering on Kit and Ahmed's relationship and the secrets Ahmed keeps from Kit and slightly unrealistic (yet interesting) conversations among the journalists and their subjects about the Arab Spring, the refugee crisis, sectarian violence, terrorism and other issues affecting the Middle East. I liked this book, even if the plot felt a bit contrived and more of a vehicle for the political conversations than an actual plot with interesting characters.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part of the book is fast paced and engrossing--the characters are drawn well, you understand why the narrator, a journalist, falls in love with Ahmed, the man she meets while covering Iraq. It's written in a style of foreshadowing, as though there are mysteries, particularly about Ahmed and the narrator's father, which will later be revealed.

The reason I give the book three stars is that this style is employed right up until the end of the book, but there is never any mystery revealed about either of them. The author seems to want the readers to reach their own conclusions about both the father and Ahmed. Letting the reader look at the whole trajectory and then draw conclusions is a great way to present a book that covers the types of contemporary (yet also timeless) issues that are here, but the foreshadowing style detracts from the reader's ability to truly to do this.

The second half of the book is devoted to the narrator's journey through rage induced racism. I found this part not well tied to the first part of the book and the two parts not well connected. This part of the book is also well written, but it's a disconnect from the rest of the book. It also makes you appreciate the reasons that someone in the main character's position would react the way she did, although you get disgusted at her reaction, but it would have been better to have more development about the relationship with her adopted son. The development is mostly about her rage, and there is still that foreshadowing style. For me, that made it harder to pull all the pieces of this story together.

I think the readers are supposed to understand her through her experiences in childhood and how those experiences carry through to her relationships with Ahmed, his son from another marriage, and her use of Ahmed to reproduce the father she never knew (he obviously has some of her father's traits). Her putting her father on a pedestal and her conflict ridden relationship with her mother (whom she sees as having abandoned her) is never resolved, although it plays out similarly with Ahmed's son.

As she falls into her racism, you have to wonder if her marriage to Ahmed was love or her wanting to save him in a colonialist sort of way. She wanted to capture his essence, so she let herself be deceived about who he was. He used her too--he wanted a white wife that could be his ticket out of Iraq. He got involved with Kit and her friends to meet other people who could take him out of Iraq.

This book gave me a lot to think about and made me see more clearly the way that someone could fall into racism after spending a lifetime trying to be culturally conscious. The main problem for me was the style in which the book was constructed.

I would recommend the book--it's certainly kept me thinking long after having finished it.

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

The protagonist of this novel is a foreign correspondent, living in Paris with her thirteen-year-old son. Her husband is an Iraqi diplomat, but they are estranged. Kit had spent her early career in the Middle East, befriending the intelligentsia, common folk and terrorists in an effort to understand what motivated the disparate feuding groups. She became sympathetic to the broader Arab point of view and believed that in Paris, where immigrants and natives lived side by side, an answer to the intractable problem of cross cultural understanding could be addressed. But when first Charlie Hebdo and the the Bataclan are bombed, she begins to question everything she thought she knew. This is a beautifully written novel with many points of view. It does a wonderful job of examining good intentions, culture clash and family dynamics.

[Sarah W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written from the perspective of a journalist who covered the Iraq War and then the refugee crisis in Europe, this book sometimes feels like a novelization of the last 20 years of news. Kitty, a British-American journalist, goes to Iraq in the early 2000s to cover the conflict and meets Ahmed, an Iraqi man who challenges her preconceptions and captures her heart. She marries him and even converts to Islam to make the marriage possible. But Ahmed carried many secrets - including another wife, a son, and the mysterious work that he does. As this book races towards the 2015 Paris attacks, the challenges of truly knowing a person become clear and the questions of identify loom over the narrative.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steavenson puts her journalistic eye to good use to give a firsthand sense of unspeakable tragedies and profound suffering. What is more impressive, though, is her adept touch as a novelist. She conveys the narrator's anger, which at times slips into xenophobia or Islamophobia. She also sympathetically portrays Islamic fundamentalists and all kinds of other characters who don't fall into either extreme, from different religious/ethnic/geopolitical backgrounds. Various perspectives are skillfully expressed, and complicated issues are explored in depth, all from very human characters. I'm surprised this book didn't get more attention. There's plenty here to spark an engaging book club discussion.

[Sarah Tittle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very gripping--in parts--story about a war correspondent that helps untangle the messy, painful knot at the heart of western and Mideast culture/political wars. When she's not being didactic (which is about 30% of the time) Steavenson's story is a sympathetic and at times suspenseful portrait of someone who's caught between two clashing worlds and struggling to find her place. The settings, which move from Iraq to Lebanon to Paris to Syria and to Brittany, are terrifically evocative. Her characters are succinctly drawn, especially the two Ahmeds. I really enjoyed this, and was moved by it, and learned from it.

[Mary Keen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well- written, IMO, but difficult to listen to --details the past and the more recent tragic incidents in Iraq, Syria, etc. leading up to riots in Paris (current day in the book) bc of the Charlie H murders.

Pretty much confirms how the bush-cheney attack on Iraq destroyed any respect or cooperation between Islam and the US--so deaths on both sides and huge expenditures are still going on with no end in sight --but public memories are short, espec with the well-financed right-wing propaganda machine.

Point of view and experiences of a journalist who, because of her marriage, has experience and insight into both sides.

Good narrator, imo.

RBDigital @ 1.25

[Stacie Saurer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book.

I was skeptical at first, & was expecting a dry history of Middle Eastern conflicts in the past 20 years from a journalist's perspective, brimming with white privilege and first world problems. Instead, I devoured a wonderfully written book with a protagonist straddling multiple world's & trying to make sense of the impossible. I am taken through news stories that I vaguely recall from the past few decades, thanks to the rapid pace of our society's news cycles. While these events can only be touched on with the broadest brush strokes, I was left with perhaps not a deeper understanding, but a desire to understand.

[Heather - what.the.heath · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. Some of it I really liked for instance the part in KOS with the refugees and the trip to visit Father Angelo (the last time they were all together) there was a lot to this book and rousse’s death was so upsetting especially with her relationship with little ahmed. a lot of it was confusing and didnt seem to add up I feel like named were sometimes dropped as if i knew who they were but they haven’t been mentioned in so long so it confused me. i liked the concept of the story and think we have had some events in 2020 that were the fulcrum moment for the next revolution in history which was interesting to think about.

[Doreen Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a little bit difficult to get into as I was confused whether it was fiction or non-fiction by the way it was written. The story covers several years including recent events in Paris. I thought that there would be more detail of the Paris attack but at the end I found myself wanting more detail about what it would have been like in all aspects of living in Paris during the attack. I do think that the author is a gifted writer but thought this story was lacking in some areas. I would like to read more from this author in the future.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kit is a foreign correspondent covering Baghdad, Syria during the Arab spring and Greece in the midst of the refugee crisis. She marries an Iraqi diplomat and eventually find herself raising his son from his first marriage after their separation. While living in Paris, a close friend dies in the Charlie Hebdo and the conflicts come a little too close to home.
While reading this book, I realized the realism of the murkiness of diplomacy and Middle Eastern tribal conflicts. Just who are the good guys and the bad guys.
This is not your usual fiction read.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review. I was at times engrossed and at others confused or bored. The premise and potential for a great novel are there but I didn’t feel as connected to the characters as I wished.

Kit is a journalist covering hot spots: Iraq during war, Beirut at the time of the Arab Spring, and Paris during recent terrorist acts. She married an Iraqi and is raising his son. She was able to distance herself from the violence and cultural differences until it hits too close to home.

[Morgan Miller-Portales · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just like her narrator, ‘Kit’ Kittredge, Wendell Steavensen is a seasoned risk-defying Anglo-American war correspondent. In ‘Paris Metro’, the author uses her experiences as a war journalist in the Middle East and attempts to transmute it into sharp and heartfelt fiction. Though on several levels, this is a deeply informed and exquisitely well-written novel, Steavensen does not fully transition from war correspondent to full-fledged novelist with several passages marred with political longueurs. A real shame as this is ultimately a very rewarding read.

[Jean Carlton · Rating 2 out of 5]

My severe lack of knowledge about this part of the world and the complexity of its political and religious history impacted my ability to get particularly involved in the story. In spite of this I marked over 70 highlights with the goal of discussing the book with a friend who recommended it. Though the book is categorized fiction, certainly the author with her extensive journalist background in the area is describing a believable situation.
p.s. the title is explained but is misleading as to the topic