The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain was an adorable little romance. If I needed to choose one word to describe it, that word would be “charming.”
I read the book in a couple of hours and I adored every second of it. This book is a great pick for anyone looking for a quick and fun romance.
My Thoughts on The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain
The book begins with a woman named Laure walking up to her front door late one night. Before she could make it inside, someone attacks her and steals her purse. While still dazed from the attack, she realizes that her head is bleeding, but she doesn’t know how serious her head wound is. Because she cannot get into her apartment, she wanders across the street to stay at a hotel for the night.
The next morning, a man named Laurent is walking to his bookstore when he sees a purse abandoned in a trash bin. He tries to turn the purse into police, but ends up taking it home. When he looks through the purse to try to figure out who the owner is, he stumbles across a red notebook.
As the book continues, we follow storylines for both Laure and Laurent.
I thought Laurent was a wonderful main character! I loved that he was so determined to reunite the mystery woman with her purse. There was only one thing that he did that really irked me, but hey, it added to the drama! I also really liked Laure, and really enjoyed learning more about her at the same time that Laurent did until she awoke from her coma.
The romance was definitely one that I was rooting for and the trope of the mystery woman was absolutely lovely. The ending was excellent. I thought the summarizing method the author used to tie up loose ends was very clever!
The book layout was a bit strange to me. The chapters didn’t have numbers or any kind of indication of which character was the narrator of that section. So you just had to dive in. Though the authors writing was so perfect that you could always tell which character it was very quickly. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the very short chapters, many which I thought could have been combined. But I didn’t feel that these two things took away from the story at all, it was just more of a personal irk.
My Favorite Passages from The Red Notebook
It took only a second for fear to travel through her veins all the way to her heart where it burst into an icy rain.
Laure looked around. The road was empty. The man was clearly not coming back, but it was difficult to control her fear, and it’s hard to distinguish between the irrational and the possible at almost two o’clock in the morning.
How many things do we feel obliged to do for the sake of it, or for appearances, or because we are trained to do them, but which weigh us down and don’t in fact achieve anything?
That sentence was so unexpected and it’s still lingering in my mind, bouncing around inside my head like that ancient video game with two lines either side of the screen and a dot going back and forth between them.
My Final Thoughts on The Red Notebook
I gave this book five stars! I can’t wait to reread it again!
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Thanks for reading!
What are your favorite cutesy romance reads?
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