The writing language was beautiful, eloquent and fluid. As for the actual story, I found it hard to understand where everyone physically was or when it was a flashback. There was not a lot of action/plot to help move the story forward and so found it hard to keep pushing through. ( )

A woman takes her young daughter and heads for Paris to start a new life. This sounded like a book I would enjoy, sounds like something I'd like to do, but it turns out not to be the book for me. ( )

The author does a good job exploring obsession, but the characters are not quite as well developed as I would like to see. ( )

As Beat opens, an American and her 7-year-old daughter explore the Louvre. Days pass and the duo wander the streets of Paris from café to museum to bistro to park. Once it has been established that this is not a vacation for Frances and her daughter Cathy but an escape from the New York suburbs, the reader starts to wonder why this mother moves from one seedy hotel to another with one eye over her shoulder during this excursion. Through flashbacks that piece together a fiery romance, author Amy Boaz methodically reveals the reasons. Her marriage to Cathy’s father Harry had grown stale and during a party, Frances fell for an older Sanskrit poet from the Midwest named Joseph [a bearded outdoorsman—someone different from anyone she would encounter at her job as a magazine editor in Manhattan]. Through this sexual awakening, a spellbound Frances allows Joseph to take too much control in the relationship. In doing so, she endangers herself.

Frances is such a flawed character that I found her annoying at times and also sympathetic. Annoying in that she gave up so much of her own life because of this man. But then sometimes you get caught up in a moment of love or lust for a while before you realize that you are giving up more than the other person which is exactly what I think happened to Frances. And that is why I ended up being sympathetic. Frances is so in love with Joseph that she wants to impress him. She wants him to move to New York to be with her but he won’t do it. She takes most of the trips out West. She admits that she’s a terrible mother at times. She has her fallacies. She loves her daughter although one night in Paris, she leaves her alone and asleep in a dingy hotel room to get a drink in a bar across the street. Finally, Frances also comes to terms with what she has given up and that she may or may not have gotten played by this charmer Joseph. She realizes that she gave up too much and must take some of it back and with that, I could empathize.

Through dazzling, smart, dynamic writing, Boaz spins an enigmatic, unique story about dissatisfaction, passionate love, and the value of individual character. Boaz writes vividly and thoughtfully. Each character is painstakingly established through lyrical prose. Whether in Colorado, New Mexico, Paris, or New York, Boaz details the scenery, the smells, the people, the sounds, the colors, and every other detail of the area so that the reader feels transported to that setting. Beautifully written, Beat often read likes poetry (and Boaz turns to Beat poets quite often). As Frances learns to cope with a love affair that has soured, Beat is at turns a tortured love story and a thriller unlike any other. ( )

A woman, Frances, travels around Paris with her 7 year old daughter, leaving her husband and infant son behind. Her lover, Joseph, is being held for questioning over the disappearance of a woman he had been living with.

As they move from hotel to hotel in Paris, Frances thinks back to the first time she met Joseph, the man she knew she would have an affair with, and their affair of over 2 years.

Written in the first person, this reads more like a memoir of an unhappy and angry woman, and a woman obsessed with a man she realizes is not as obsessed over her as she would like him to be, a man who she discovers later, to be a womanizer.

There are too many unanswered questions in this story to make it a satisfying read. Why exactly is a man following Frances in Paris, what does she really know about the woman's disappearance, why does she really continue to stay away, and what is to be done about Harry ... to name but a few that surface as one gets to the end of the book.

I give this a 2 star and if not for the fact that I wanted to write a review on the book since it's an ARC, I would have given it up after 100 pages. There was very little in it to hold my constantly diverted attention. ( )