The Way I Found Her - Couverture souple

The Washington Post Drenched in tenderness and affection...

The Seattle Times A story so real and a portrait so sympathetic that it is actually unsettling to finish the book in which these people live.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution This book lingers in the memory like a good European vacation.

The New York Times Book Review The Way I Found Her is at once a mystery story, a psychological exploration and a novel of ideas. That it should succeed and provoke on these various levels pays high tribute to Tremain's intellect; that it should do so while remaining as apparently weightless and as thoroughly engaging as any precocious adolescent's account of his summer holidays is a testament to Rose Tremain's superlative storytelling gifts.

San Francisco Chronicle Rose Tremain is a master of shifting, provocative tone: she entertains, confronts, amuses, and threatens....In her seventh novel, the fascinated and occasionally dizzy reader reaches an even higher level of sheer enjoyment, all the richer for being mixed with sorrow...Tremain's brilliance in this work is to show what it is to be cherished in life, as only a child may, and what will always be regretted, as only an adult can do.

The Washington Post This is a literary puzzle where every sentence counts as mystery, as art. The plotting here is as elegant as a recurring pattern in an excellent piece of silk. I can't think of a better novel to read this summer.

Library Journal (starred review) Think A Separate Peace and Catcher in the Rye, throw in dashes of Colette and Francoise Sagan, center all these elements with a genuine mystery at the core, and you have Tremain's wonderfully bittersweet novel of a boy on the brink of manhood, puzzling over life and love as the hot Paris summer sizzles and burns.

The New York Times One is struck, before Ms. Tremain's fine and diverse fictions, not merely by the pleasures of their prose but by the rigor of her literary risk-taking and by the virtuosic acuity with which she inhabits her characters -- in short, by the formidable mind behind her work....What impresses most about this highly enjoyable novel is the accuracy with which she captures the reflections of a precocious intelligence on the cusp of adulthood.

People A touching love story...What is clear -- thanks to Tremain's convincingly detailed storytelling -- is that the relationship [between Lewis and Valentina] is based on more than a crush. And never does the author let readers forget that this is Lewis' first love.

The Washington Times There is magic in Rose Tremain's evocation of a summer in Paris....Her touch is light, subtle, and complex -- just like the beautiful city at the center of her tale.

This is the summer that Lewis Little, precocious thirteen-year-old, is spending in Paris with his beautiful mother, Alice, who is translating the latest medieval romance by Valentina Gavrilovich, the bestselling and exotic Russian émigré. This is the summer that the bewitching Valentina beckons from her sofa, and Lewis discovers an exquisite new world filled with passion and intrigue, set against the alluring backdrop of Paris.
But when Valentina disappears and Lewis takes it upon himself to find her, wondrous secrets suddenly turn sinister. This is the summer that Lewis, caught in a bizarre and dangerous romance, is about to face head-on the perilous force that transforms children into adults.