Home Away

A tale of misapprehensions, transformations and rose at lunch as one American couple quits their perfectly good jobs, packs up their house in Brooklyn and moves their family to rural France for a year. In their fantasy, bons mots would drip from every quaintly churlish local character, and their two non-French speaking daughters would soon make adorable Gallic best friends at the village school. Their clunky little American family would be magically transformed into graceful, fluent French people the moment they all donned berets. Yet despite the beauty of the landscape and the warmth of the air, things were not as the family had dreamed they would be. Nobody wore a beret, ever, and life with children in a foreign land proved more challenging than anyone had imagined. The book details the many delights of life in France, but also celebrates the all-too-human mistakes the family made as they bumbled towards magic during one year of their lives. In time, the family falls into the rhythm of daily life, rediscovering the only home that matters: the home they have in one another.