Paris by the Book

You might recognize Liam Callanan's name as the author of The Cloud Atlas; I neither read it nor saw the movie. But I was intrigued by the premise of this book. A sometimes happy family in Milwaukee consists of: Robert, a father who writes mostly children's stories, so isn't wildly successful and doesn't make much money; Leah, a mother who gave up dreams of being a film maker to become a speech writer for the president of a university in order to have a consistent income; and two teenage daughters Daphne and Ellie. One day Robert goes out for an early morning run and never returns. He has occasionally disappeared before to do his "write-aways" but has always left a note. So it is days before the police will take the disappearance seriously. They believe the absence of clues means he is probably dead. The rest of the family don't believe that. But at some point Leah finds a cryptic slip of paper in Robert's granola jar that turns out to be an airline reservation for 4 flights to Paris, the place he always promised Leah they would go. So Leah and the girls go, hoping Robert is waiting there for them. And then they stay. Ellie's godmother and Leah's friend, Eleanor, finds a partial manuscript of Robert's which she sends to them, describing a family that goes to Paris, buys a run down bookstore, and stays--only the mother disappears. Daphne and Ellie are convinced this is a clue and begin the search for the bookstore he described and for their father. They find one that fits the bill, and as luck would have it, the weary proprietor is happy to hire them to run it and rent them the apartment upstairs. So begins the tale of those left behind and how they cope. For most of the book, nobody knows if Robert is alive. Two classic children's stories, the Madeline series and The Red Baloon, frame the story.
Publishers Weekly calls it "sublime" and say, "Callanan has crafted a beautifully-drawn portrait of a woman interrupted set among the exquisite magic of Paris, where life frequently imitates art and the ghosts of the past linger just out of sight." Kirkus writes a more measured review.