3.5 star rating for Paris for One (a novella); 2.5 star rating for the “other” stories).
Paris for One is the story of Nell, 26 and unmarried (insert gasp!) but dating a rather useless boyfriend. After mentioning to him that she’s never been to Paris, he responds with “you should go one day, you’d love it), so she immediately buys plane tickets and books a hotel room for a weekend getaway. Unsurprisingly (at least, to everyone but Nell), useless boyfriend no shows, and she’s left to navigate the city alone. Of course, she meets a dashing Frenchman and rekindles her own inner flame. Blah blah. It was cute, it would probably make a decent romcom that I wouldn’t see unless I really liked the actors, and it had a fun ending.
The other stories, taken one by one, each seem pretty good. But when you read them one after another, you realize they’re all the same story. They’re ALL about an unhappy married woman who almost walks away before realizing that she loves her husband after all. SERIOUSLY. I think at least 4 of them follow that model. The only one I really liked was Between the Tweets, which had a great ending. The rest were just duplicates of each other.