Oh, I did not like this! I feel like one of my new favorite authors just shit all over two couples that I spent an entire 600 page novel falling in love with. Bad Jojo! No no!
Jojo Moyes released Honeymoon in Paris as a prequel to The Girl You Left Behind — intending people to read the prequel before the novel’s official release. I did it the opposite way — I loved The Girl You Left Behind, so when I discovered a prequel based on the first few months of Sofie’s marriage to Eduoard, and Liv’s marriage to David, I leapt at the chance to spend more time with these loving couples. After all, in The Girl, we only get to meet the wives — their husbands have mostly become fond memories. But they loved those two men fiercely, and I really wanted to meet them.
Unfortunately, Jojo (yes, I call her Jojo — we’ve spent a lot of time together lately) spends the first half of this book showing us how incredibly unhappily these women feel as they begin their new lives with their husbands. Sofie keeps meeting women who’ve slept with Edouard, or insinuate that he cannot remain faithful, and his money problems weigh on her. David ditches Liv on their honeymoon to go work on the Goldstein building, and then she meets an older gent outside an art museum. Jojo does do a good job of paralleling their stories, like she does in The Girl You Left Behind, and even links them through a painting again. And while of course they all get their happily-ever-afters (I mean, until David dies unexpectedly and Edouard ends up in a death camp…), I wish I’d never even bothered.
