My Book Review of My Wish List:

I was a bit taken aback from the bluntness of Delacourt’s writing, as although I’ve been reading quite of heap of French Literature over the months since I first started touring with France Book Tours, I must confess, he has a unique way for telling it like it is in a very cutting way as to leave nothing for the imagination. Somehow the opening bits of the story felt a bit awkward as I was expecting this entirely different story to shape into the starting bits of My Wish List. Not that this is entirely bad per se, but what I was sort of expecting was slightly different than what I was being given. I suppose in some ways, I felt she (Jo) might have had an idyllic life whilst owning her fabric shoppe, and that might have complicated things when her tides changed. Instead, I found a middle-aged French woman whose woes out number her blessings, and where a bit of crudeness intersects with her musings on why everything is unfair simply because life took a different path than she hoped it would.

The one part of her life I could settle into is the fact she’s an avid knitter, with projects cast on the needles all the time. She off-sets her business in fabric during the slow seasons by selling her creations in fiber, and that intrigued me. If this story was more about the haberdashery shoppe & her knitting adventures, whilst Jo turnt sour on her marriage and was looking for a bit of adventure to spice it back together, I think I would have found my footing a bit easier in the narrative. The necessity to express that life is spent whilst engaging in one lie after another lie was a bit daunting as I personally could not make a connection with the train of thought Delacourt was enticing his readers to connect with him.

His crude way of expressing intimacy and passion was a turn-off for me, as I appreciate romance and love in purer forms of expression. This is clearly one book whose premise led me astray as far as what I would find inside its covers, and I was not overly thrilled by what I was finding on the pages. In fact rather than finding an uplifting novel bent against a life shift opportunity to change one’s stars, I found the story to be sordidly depressing and full of negativity rather than light or grace. The entire world of Jo is painted black, and not in the ways you’d expect someone to find themselves depressed with their life in their middle forties!

The shortness of the story in length I wish had made up for the blights I felt against it. It was such a tug and pull to get into the heart of what makes Jo tick and why she feels the way in which she does. Each time I felt as though the story was making a turn for the better, the undertone of the elements turnt stark dark again. For me I did not make it even half-way through and that was the most I could tolerate. This is one author who disappointed me greatly whilst giving me food for thought about stories in French turnt in translation to English.