Three Weeks in Paris

No, I’m not planning to take a vacation in France. That’s too expensive. It would be nice to go there. A few years ago, I read an article about a restaurant in Paris where patrons dine in the dark to get a feel for what it’s like to eat when you’re blind. Although I have some vision, I would fit right in. I wouldn’t have to worry if I dropped food in my lap while cutting it or knocked over my water glass because everyone else would be doing the same thing.

Anyway, I just finished reading Three Weeks in Paris by Barbara Taylor Bradford. This has nothing to do with dining in the dark, although a few of the characters have romantic candlelit dinners in Paris restaurants. Alex, Kay, Jessica, and Maria are four friends who attend a design school in Paris. Right before their graduation, they have a falling out, and after they graduate, they go their separate ways. Seven years later, they are reunited and  make up when they return to Paris to attend their teacher’s eighty-fifth birthday party and deal with other unfinished business. I like the way the author leaves the question of why the friends quarreled until close to the end of the book.

Barbara  Taylor Bradford grew up in Yorkshire, England. Her mother, a children’s nurse and nanny, introduced her to books when she was four, and by the time she was twelve, she had read all the books by Charles Dickens and the Brontes. When she was fifteen and a half, she started working as a typist for The Yorkshire Evening Post. Within six months, she was promoted to cub reporter. According to her official Web site, she joked that this was because she was such a lousy typist. At the age of eighteen, she became the newspaper’s women’s page editor. When she was twenty, she moved to London where she worked as fashion editor for Woman’s Own. She wrote for other magazines and newspapers on a variety of topics from crime to show business. In 1961, she met film producer Robert Bradford on a blind date, and in 1963, they were married and moved to the U.S. After years of writing children’s books and a  column on fashion and interior design that was published in newspapers across America, she realized her dream of publishing adult fiction when in 1976, she sold her first novel, A Woman of Substance, to a publisher on the strength of a ten-page outline and a hundred and ninety-two pages. Today, she is published in over ninety countries and forty languages with a sales figure in excess of eighty-two million dollars. To learn more, go to http://www.barbarataylorbradford.com/

Abbie Johnson Taylor

Author of We Shall Overcome

http://www.abbiejohnsontaylor.com

abbie@samobile.net