BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: The Paper Palace (Miranda Cowley Heller, author)

contemporary fiction, Cape Cod, summer, family cottage, infidelity, sexual assault, family secrets, hard choices, first loves.

Around the time Where the Crawdads Sing was published and took over the book charts, The Paper Palace, a summertime Cape Cod novel, hit the bookstores. It was a bit sideswiped by Crawdads at the time, and is a bit controversial, but it is well worth a read. Miranda Cowley Heller creates a strong and almost tangible sense of place, a summer cottage on a pond on Cape Cod, oscillating between the 1970s and present day. The simple rustic (and somewhat flimsy) cottage, dubbed the Paper Palace by a grandfather, is a place where families go year after year to swim and boat and grill hotdogs and eat pancakes and get sunburned. It is a place with overgrowth and a woodsiness perfect for childhood exploration and friends who return year after year. 

In this place we meet Elle, a reasonably happy married mother of three, returning to her family’s cottage with her nuclear family. As a child she had a best friend and perhaps first young love, Jonah, the one who got away. As the story unfolds, we learn about Elle’s childhood and teenage trauma; she was sexually assaulted by a friend of her stepfather. The abuser has died, but Elle had an indirect hand in his death. The summer of the novel, Jonah returns after a years-long absence, and the two unite in secret.

The sense of place in The Paper Palace is so specificand well-written that the reader feels present in the key moments of the story. We hear the rustle of grasses along the water’s edge, itch from the bug bites that attack bare legs in the woods, enjoy the cooling splash breaking the still surface of the lake on an early morning dip. The authors’ ability to deliver details so vividly that the reader is rendered present makes the characters all the more real and forgivably human. The story is messy. Elle must decide between her life with Peter and her past, and perhaps, current, love of Jonah. There is a lot to unpack here, and we don’t always love Elle, though her childhood traumas makes her highly sympathetic.

Spoiler alert-the ending is one of those ambiguous ones that is both perfect and deeply dissatisfying. It is the kind that keeps you debating at book groups for hours, and the kind of ending that keeps the book cycling in and out of mind for weeks and months after reading it. When I finished this book, I wanted to hop onto vrbo.com and rent a cottage on the Cape, and jump in a cool lake on a humid day before making s’mores over a fire. Pick up this book and tuck it in your duffle for spring break or summer vacation.

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