The post Need Your Book Translated? appeared first on Books du Jour.

(Clarkson Potter, pp 250, $19.99)

If you lived abroad for an extended period, even simply during a semester off while in college, you know that cultures are nothing alike. There is as much in common between Russian and Portuguese bread than between a whale and a tiger. That is what give the world its colors and texture. There has been a bevy of books about raising children in foreign countries of late.  France and Paris seem to be the target to this topic.  A mother forced to live abroad because her husband’s multi-national has relocated the family to a distant land or simply a single mom in search of new adventures learn quickly that, in France, things are not quite the same as in the States. They readjust with more and less success to the new local flavors.

There’s always an element of silliness and caricature while observing another’s culture. Italians speak with their hands; French shakes their head to show easy irritation, and so on . . . But beyond surface observations, social frameworks speak louder than words. They are harder to pinpoint. The French knock on your door uninvited for dinner. The Spanish don’t start dinner before 11 pm, and the Dutch bring their own food along in case you have not inferred the hint. Yes, they are camping in your place, for a few days.

In their charming illustrated book, “Say Bonjour to the Lady,” Florence Mars and Pauline Lévêque achieve that sweet delicate balance by drawing funny everyday situations between the art of raising children in Paris versus New York, from first-hand experience, without falling into obvious cultural yawns. What becomes apparent with the Lévêque‘s clean-lined illustrations and Mars‘s micro texts is the swinging pendulum between the two cultures applying different approaches to reach nonetheless the same goal. On one hand, French parents seems far less concerned or involved in monitoring their children around the clock, which could be interpreted as a sign of trust. They preferring instead to allow their children’s own self-development to flourish or let them deal with themselves to the point of coming across as not caring. Whereas in New York, parents seems at the service of their children around the clock, to the point of appearing to reveal an underlying anxiety or fear of missing out or stunting or damaging them if they fail to validate any one of their initiatives. Which would be a mistake to believe as well. New York parents simply love to include their children in their lives. Raising them is a hands-on family affair.  The book’s strength stems from the playful comparisons Lévêque and Mars draw. Both sides have wonderful and sad pros and cons. If you can accept that, in France, children play in a separate room located as far as possible from the adults’ center of gravity, the living room, and that, in New York, parents live in their children’s living room, another word for playroom, you are in for a few complicit merry giggles.

The post Author du Jour: Pauline Lévêque and Florence Mars appeared first on Books du Jour.

(William Morrow, pp 368, $26.99)

In “The Wicked City,” one can smell the whiffs of Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway as he journeys back and forth between New York and East Egg. You can touch Princeton, the Prohibition, the allure of speakeasies with Fitzgerald pouring himself a scotch, and nudging the fabulously wealthy yawning at thought of attending the next party. From where we stand, the era feels like a distant shore, a fata morgana only made possible by the booming business and new wealth created overnight, the windfall of WWI. In typical Hollywood stories, with the new breed of winners come the losers, and not necessarily those who never had, but rather those who tried hard, got there, and walked away on a whim, which, for many of us, reveals a certain disposition towards foolishness. This is where Williams starts her two-time-framed narrative. The story moved from present to past and back and forth. “The Wicked City” is a Nick Carraway journey in reverse.

Ella Gilbert starts at the top of society and decides to leave it all behind upon learning that her banker husband cheats on her. She trades her life of luxury and high-comfort in Soho for a small pad of Greenwich Village. That’s for the near present. But Williams’s story also is situated in 1924, where the Village was not the ultra-expensive resort for the startup moguls of today. Back then there were forbidden places, where more prosaic people went in search of excitement. The place in question is a speakeasy, the Christopher Club. The club introduces the second protagonist, Geneva Keely, a flapper, who gets caught in a raid and is forced to help the police track down her father, an important bootlegger . . . The story takes its own flight as we ponder how the two narratives are interrelated, making the twists and turns highly entertaining and surprising.

The post Author du Jour: Beatriz Williams appeared first on Books du Jour.