Looking Through Windows: How Paris By The Book By Liam Callanan Changed My Perspective

We’re constantly looking, searching, willing answers to appear in various places. It’s one of the reasons we turn to songs, books, people, and places—not just for escape, but for understanding, adventure, and realizing there’s more out there than we ever could have fathomed. These things aren’t just a window into another world, but into the unknown parts of ourselves. 

I picked up Paris By The Book by Liam Callanan in the hopes of finding solace in a story, one about a city I’ve always dreamed of visiting. Page by page I was hooked. Soon I found a passage that immediately reminded me of the Taylor Swift song, “I Look In People’s Windows”:

“All these wonders lining Paris sidewalks—corny wonders, as here in the cinema-hotel’s overstuffed lobby, or civilized wonders, as in my tumbledown bookshop—and no one but the occasional tourist even turned to look in the window?... I thought I’d assimilated so well to Paris life, but this must have been how the city read me for what I was, a visitor, a tourist, someone who looked in windows. A widow,” (Callanan, 216).

Paris By The Book follows its protagonist, Leah, as she moves her family from Milwaukee to Paris after her husband Robert goes missing. Her family operates a bookstore, following the plot in Robert’s unfinished manuscript which Leah finds. This book is a story about the blurry line between reality and what we wish was real. Concrete evidence and an unexplainable tug. Holding on and letting go. It explores the grandiosity alongside modesty of Paris, grief in the same space as joy. I was both happy and sad while reading it. It took me on a Parisian adventure, but it also brought light to the dissonance of appearance versus reality. Especially during a transitional season in my own life where reflecting on the past and wondering what the future holds comes so naturally, this novel forced me to contend with feelings I would’ve pushed aside otherwise, urging me to finally be present. 

I didn’t want to put Paris By The Book down because I kept wanting to know the answers, kept hoping for the truth to show up, and ultimately for what was missing to be found again. I felt wholeheartedly connected to Leah as she willed her wishes to come true. Sitting in the waiting, the not knowing, the hoping and yearning and praying through tears is one of the hardest places to be. A feeling of being in limbo, just wishing to turn back or move forward, but definitely not sit in the right now. And yet, the present is all that’s really visible, all that’s really real. 

By the end of the novel I found that it’s okay to look through windows, whether you’ve found what you’re looking for or not. It’s even better to look where you are.