“I guess it goes to show that you just never know where life will take you. You search for answers. You wonder what it all means. You stumble, and you soar. And, if you’re lucky, you make it to Paris for a while.”

Ever since I returned from a vacation in Paris, I have been consumed by a desire to read books about the city of lights.  I recently came across a biography by Amy Thomas, "Paris, My Sweet: A Year in the City of Lights (and Dark Chocolate)" and immediately grabbed it.  A very sweet (pun intended!) story about Thomas and her move from New York to Paris for work.  She gets a dream job working as a writer for a fashion house in Paris and decides this is a sign that she is meant to see how living in her favourite city is.  What makes Thomas' story even more enticing is that she is a dessert junkie and this memoir not only chronicles her life in Paris but the many many wonderful sweets that she eats while she is there.  She does a compare and contrast of the desserts she fines in Paris with the ones from New York, ranging from chocolate chip cookies, to macarons, to cakes, and to hot chocolate.  I was pretty much drooling the entire time I was reading this yummy memoir!  An added bonus is that she lists her favourite spots in both cities so if you are going to visit either then you know just where to go to get your favourite sweet treats! Another thing that was really great about this memoir was that it often talks about how Thomas is taking a chance making this move and how sometimes we have to take the leap to find what it is we really want and need in life.  She quotes Joseph Campbell at the beginning and I want to share the quotation she uses because I just think it is fantastic:

"And I have the firm belief in this now, not only in terms of my own experience but in knowing about the experience of others, that when you follow your bliss, door will open where you would not have thought there were going to be doors and where there wouldn't be a door for anybody else. If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living"

 A fun and light summer read and definitely one that will make you hungry!