The Paris Apartment Book Review

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley: Book Review

*Warning: This review contains spoilers*

*Content Warning*

This review contains mentions of sex trafficking. 

Introduction

Okay, so… I don’t actually like giving negative reviews of books. I don’t seek out to dislike books. I genuinely always go into a book with the hopes I’ll enjoy it. I would love to live in a world where the lowest rating I ever gave a book was a 3.5, where most books could be 4s and 5s and faves.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley. I was so intrigued to read this book because I studied French for five years and wanted to read a thriller with French undertones. 

What I got instead was mostly just a disappointment. 

Summary and Review

First of all, I would like to say that the protagonist of this story, Jess, adds absolutely nothing to the story at all. She isn’t dynamic as a character at all, barely has her own arc, and adds relatively little to the actual plot. In fact, most the plot is taking place in the flashbacks before Jess even arrives in the story. Her character literally exists for no other reason than to guide the reader through the mystery, because Foley needed a POV character who didn’t know the twist and could therefore keep the mystery and mystery. But she didn’t bother to actually give Jess a story of her own. 

Second of all, there is not one single likable character present in this story. You won’t root for anyone, you won’t feel bad for anyone, you won’t really care what happens to any of them. Honestly, you probably won’t even care enough about any of them enough to dislike them either. It’s basically a story about a messed-up, rich, dysfunctional family with a “sinister” secret, so there’s not much to like. I’m not saying you necessarily need a character to be likable to be interesting to read about; villains and morally gray characters are often fun too. But these characters are such bland, flat stock versions of the archetypes they represent that they lack any of the intrigue necessary to even make villains interesting. They basically make this story feel like a caricature of a mystery/thriller story. 

That being said, the part of this story that really, truly made me dislike this book isn’t the boring characters. It’s the recurring element that every member of the family with infatuated and sexually pursuing the same man (??????)

Jess’ brother Ben is the newcomer in town and is apparently going to discover the family’s involvement in their dark secret (spoiler alert, it’s a sex trafficking ring *vomit*). Anyway, the matriarch of the family—a middle aged woman named Sophie—has an affair with the much younger Ben. Her stepson Nick, a man about Ben’s age, also fools around with him, discovering that he’s LGBT in the process, and the nineteen-year-old daughter, Mimi, is literally so infatuated with Ben that she ends up breaking into his apartment, dressing herself in lingerie, sprawling on his bed to wait for him to come home, and then seduce him (????)

I’m sure I don’t need to explain all the levels of absolute creepy that little plot point is. And, especially, imagine if the gender roles were reversed and a guy was breaking into a woman’s apartment who he barely knew and laying himself out on her bed to try and seduce her by surprise when she got home. If you think that’s bad (which you should), then you shouldn’t find it less horrific when Mimi did it just because she’s not a man. 

The storyline between Ben and Nick is also the worst exploration of a coming out/realizing your gay story I have ever read. There was such an underlying homophobic tone to the whole thing that I was practically gagging along with the truly abysmal, harmful representation that Foley gave. 

Aside from the problematic elements of this story, the other truly baffling part of it is that, by the end, I didn’t even understand why these people were all so infatuated with Ben. His character wasn’t fleshed out at all, so there wasn’t anything special about him. If you’re going to have multiple characters all fall head over heels for the same character, you better explore why that character is so magnetic. Otherwise, the reader is just going to be confused like I am about Ben. 

There’s also a lot of “plot twists” at the end of this story that don’t make a whole lot of sense. Sophie is actually formerly one of the sex-trafficked girls and now the family’s matriarch, Mimi isn’t really her daughter, and *gasp* Ben isn’t actually dead! They actually murdered Jacques, one of the stepbrothers, and passed his corpse off as Ben’s to cover it up (how, I really don’t know, forensics exist so…). 

Oh, and in the end, Jess gets money to start a new life if anyone cares. 

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, I have to give The Paris Apartment 1 star. I didn’t find anything in it that I really liked. If you liked or loved this book, I’m not trying to sway or change your opinion, if anything I’m glad you actually found something to enjoy in it where I didn’t! Sadly, it’s a pass from me.