This week, our heroine is a middle-aged ugly duckling.

In The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles by Katherine Pancol, Josephine Cortes’ husband dumps her for a young salon chick. All Josephine has left is her suburban Paris apartment, her teen/tween daughters, one of whom wears a bikini all too well and constantly tells her, “Mom, you’re such a buzzkill.” The other daughter is as sweet and puffy as a marshmallow.

Josephine herself is the sort of woman who looks down at the sidewalk and hopes nobody notices her mousy brown hair or the extra twenty pounds packed around her waist.

Oh, but she has brains. She’s a twelfth-century scholar and a translator.

Wouldn’t you know it but Josephine has a rich and beautiful sister, Iris, who, I don’t know why, tells her rich and gossipy friends that she’s taken up writing a novel.

And they believe her.

You’d think a woman who tells such a tall tale to her friends could come up with an actual 80,000-word, publishable tall tale. But Iris is at a loss. She confesses her foolishness to Josephine, who tries to inspire her with some twelfth-century real-life tall tales. But the only idea that really inspires Iris is a big plan:

Why don’t you write the book, Josephine? Then we’ll put my name on it. You can have the money. I’ll do the publicity.

We know Josephine needs the money.

And we sort-of know that Iris will excel at the publicity.

The book breaks sales records left and right. It’s a darn good read; Josephine sees her fellow Metro riders lost in the pages of her, or, um, Iris’ book.

And Iris promotes the heck out of it. She sparkles through all the television interviews. She submits to hair-cutting stunts. She, um, grabs the kind of attention that gets her face splattered across the tabloids. Family members walk by a newsstand or pick up a little light reading at the beauty parlor only to be mortified by Iris’s latest stunt.

Will anyone ever know who really wrote France’s favorite new novel? Will Josephine turn into a swan? Will her ex-husband, now raising crocodiles in Kenya (and thus the title) be sorry he left?

Yellow Eyes feels hastily written. I could swear there are mistakes nobody caught. For instance, Josephine tell Iris’s kind and handsome husband that she’s busy with the book. But only two pages before, she kept it all a secret from him.

Yellow Eyes is also thoroughly French, with a side-honey for nearly every married person. The story includes a few blunt cow patties, but they pass quickly.

Pancol packs a lot into her story. It’s not Jane Austen, but it’ll do.

 

Photo via Visualhunt