FT Magazine – Rose Jacobs

Some readers will be turned off by the conceit of this first novel, in which an American fashionista in Paris seeks help from a syndicate of Catholic saints in her search for true love. But this is less chick-lit than an insight into one strain of modem expat life. Remedy, the narrator, is fluent in French and appreciated at work, but she befriends outsiders – the Muslim office cleaners. her Egyptian dance teacher, a blind nun – more than she does the natives. An idiosyncratic, deliberate character, she lives at the intersection of an immigrant’s vivid Paris and her own internal world, she turns what could be a cloying tale into something much stranger – and more charming.