I am a relatively quick reader, so for a book to take me some two months to read means several things..
1. I am not all that interested in it
2. I am not completely thrown off it so I am still willing to pick it up now and then, if I can remember to, among all the other many books I am reading at the same time.

So here this book is, it was brought along in the car as my ‘waiting to pick up the kids from school’ read, it was brought along in the swimming bag as my ‘waiting for the kids to finish their swim class’ read. For a book, it was relatively widely travelled, at least in my suburban town.

Parts of the book interested me. I liked reading about Tariq and his strange escape from Morocco. I was disappointed when Sandrine disappeared, I wanted to find out more about her. I learnt a lot more about the Parisian metro system and station names than I ever expected to learn from a book.

I enjoyed reading the invented archived interviews that Hannah listens to as part of her research. It reminded me of when I did my master’s thesis and how I combed through audio interviews in the Singapore archives.

The stories of Tariq and Hannah often felt like two separate books that just so happened to coincidentally come together in one, in a way that I still don’t get. And that was seemingly brushed off as a, eh, that’s what people do, kind of way.

For me this was a, ah Paris, and an, ah historical research, but essentially meh read.