4.5 stars for French excellence.

A charity shop gem that completely took me by surprise! Alain-Fournier has enchanted me. The Lost Estate was the first time in quite a while where I felt compelled to continue reading and regretted needing to step away from the story momentarily to attend to life's demands. Its beginning has a Narnia-like wonder and fantastical air, which I loved. A schoolboy who becomes lost in the woods and stumbles upon a decadent feast in a mysterious location, spotting the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, and then desperately attempts to return to this place? I was hooked. The ending lost my interest slightly as the novel begins to prioritize the realistic over its prior fantastical elements (the strange boy with the bandaged face! the nighttime mob outside the house! the wedding festivities! the circus!), and the conclusion is, well, very appropriately and tragically French. Simone de Beauvoir's "The Woman Destroyed" is still fresh on my mind, and there are some thematic links.

Taylor has been a good friend and already heard me rave about this, but it's SO good. Books like this truly make me lament how few of the texts included in high school and college curricula are texts in translation. Even as an English major, opportunities for such reading are pretty scarce and often limited by faculty specialties. I want to experience the whole world through stories!