A young Miss Hadley Richardson, with high spirits and lovely auburn hair, meets a handsome aspiring writer named Ernest Hemingway. They marry and make their way to Paris, living in a squalid apartment and spending time in cafe society with fellow expatriates Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach. Though the post-World War I years offer a great deal of creative freedom for these idle Americans, self-indulgence is the code of the day. Will Hadley choose to step aside as literary success-and another woman-come to take their place in Ernest's life? In her second novel (following A Ticket To Ride), McLain creates a compelling, spellbinding portrait of a marriage. Hemingway is a magnetic figure whose charm is tempered by his dark, self-destructive tendencies. Hadley is strong and smart, but she questions herself at every turn. Women of all ages and situations will sympathize as they follow this seemingly charmed union to its inevitable demise. Verdict Colorful details of the expat life in Jazz Age Paris, combined with the evocative story of the Hemingways' romance, result in a compelling story that will undoubtedly establish McLain as a writer of substance. Highly recommended for all readers of popular fiction. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/10.]-Susanne Wells, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

McLain (A Ticket to Ride) offers a vivid addition to the complex-woman-behind-the-legendary-man genre, bringing Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, to life. Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by the brash "beautiful boy," and after a brief courtship and small wedding, Hadley and Ernest take off for Paris, "the place to be," according to Sherwood Anderson. McLain ably portrays the cultural icons of the 1920s-Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra and Dorothy Pound-and the impact they have on the then unknown Hemingway, casting Hadley as a rock of Gibraltar for a troubled man whose brilliance and talent were charged and compromised by his astounding capacity for alcohol and women. Hadley, meanwhile, makes a convincing transformation from an overprotected child to a game and brave young woman who puts up with impoverished living conditions and shattering loneliness to prop up her husband's career. The historical figure cameos sometimes come across as gimmicky, but the heart of the story-Ernest and Hadley's relationship-gets an honest reckoning, most notably the waves of elation and despair that pull them apart. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

History is sadly neglectful of the supporting players in the lives of great artists. Fortunately, fiction provides ample opportunity to bring these often fascinating personalities out into the limelight. Gaynor Arnold successfully resurrected the much-maligned Mrs. Charles Dickens in Girl in a Blue Dress (2009), now Paula McLain brings Hadley Richardson Hemingway out from the formidable shadow cast by her famous husband. Though doomed, the Hemingway marriage had its giddy high points, including a whirlwind courtship and a few fast and furious years of the expatriate lifestyle in 1920s Paris. Hadley and Ernest traveled in heady company during this gin-soaked and jazz-infused time, and readers are treated to intimate glimpses of many of the literary giants of the era, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the real star of the story is Hadley, as this time around, Ernest is firmly relegated to the background as he almost never was during their years together. Though eventually a woman scorned, Hadley is able to acknowledge without rancor or bitterness that Hem had helped me to see what I really was and what I could do. Much more than a woman-behind-the-man homage, this beautifully crafted tale is an unsentimental tribute to a woman who acted with grace and strength as her marriage crumbled.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist

NO one ever accused Ernest Hemingway of creating memorable women characters - except perhaps in his posthumously published Paris memoir, "A Moveable Feast," where he idealizes his first wife, Hadley Richardson, as the alter ego who shared with him the good old days before fame and fortune and another woman wrecked it all. Hadley Richardson now comes into her own, sort of, as the long-suffering wife in Paula McLain's stylish new novel. Narrated largely from Hadley's point of view, "The Paris Wife" smoothly chronicles her five-year marriage to the novelist, most of which was spent in Paris among aspiring writers when, as McClain's Hadley recalls, "we were beautifully blurred and happy." This is her own movable feast: Paris was fresh, the wine was flowing and "there was only today to throw yourself into without thinking about tomorrow." Though initially disgusted by the expatriate community, which, as the fictional Hadley remembers, "preened and talked rot and drank themselves sick," Hemingway was ineluctably drawn into its orbit - and then into the orbit of the rich, who "had better days and freer nights. They brought the sun with them and made the tides move." No one does this better than chic Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy Midwesterner who works for Vogue, wears "a coat made of hundreds of chipmunk skins sewn painfully together" and sets her cap for Ernest. "Keep watch for the girl who will come along and ruin everything," Hadley warns herself, after the fact. There's a certain inevitability, then, about what happens in "The Paris Wife." Based on letters and biographies, and on Hemingway's own ample recollections of Paris, the novel proceeds by the book - all the books, in fact, about Paris in the 1920s, including those by Hemingway - and thus bumps against the usual expatriate suspects, like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, who, as Hadley almost apologetically explains, "were or would soon become giants in the field of arts and letters, but we weren't aware of this at the time." Livelier and fresher is the reconstruction of Hadley's youth. The migraine-ridden daughter of a suffrage-minded mother and an alcoholic father who had committed suicide, Hadley is a sheltered young woman from St. Louis who plays Rachmaninoff on the piano while yearning to break free of the staid "Victorian manners keeping everything safe and reliable." Hemingway is just the ticket. Though eight years her junior, he is an ambitious, proud fledgling journalist intending to be a great writer. "There wasn't any fear in him that I could see, just intensity and aliveness," Hadley notes with cloying naïveté. The couple meet in Chicago, soon marry and, on the advice of Sherwood Anderson, bolt the monotonous Midwest for adventure, paid for partially by Hadley's inheritance, in the City of Light. But the city soon turns gray and rainy. Forlorn whenever Ernest leaves her, Hadley tries to keep him from going to Smyrna to cover the Greco-Turkish war. "I was asking him to choose me over his work," she acknowledges. His refusal signals the beginning of the end. Two months later, when Ernest is covering the peace conference in Lausanne, Hadley plans to meet him there and, for a surprise, to bring him all his manuscripts, including carbon copies and a novel-in-progress. She packs them into a small suitcase, then somehow manages to lose the bag on the train. Fighting him with the only weapon at her disposal - passive aggression - she has also forgotten to bring her birth control. Hadley wants a child; Ernest does not. "What was really unacceptable were bourgeois values, wanting something small and staid and predictable, like one true love, or a child," she says without affect. "I was supposed to have my own ideas and ambitions and be incredibly hungry for experience and newness of every variety. But I wasn't hungry; I was content." In Pamplona, Hadley identifies with the bulls. "My body was doing what it was meant to do," the now pregnant Hadley reflects, "and these animals, they were living out their destinies too." Of course, as we know all too well, Hadley isn't any more insulated from disaster than the animals in the ring, though she, like Hemingway, again blames the rich Americans who ride into Pamplona in chauffeured limousines - and who "spoil everything." What to do? Eat, drink and not think about tomorrow, à la Hemingway - or at least according to a ravenous Hadley, now a Hemingway character manqué. "I found I was hungry," she says when they settle into a cafe after watching a man being gored at a bullfight, "and that it all tasted very good to me." We recall the physically damaged Jake Barnes of "The Sun Also Rises," who takes refuge in food and alcohol and in acting hard-boiled but cries himself to sleep at night. As Jake's female counterpart, the symbolically impotent and resolutely unmodern Hadley lulls herself for a short time into a willful state of denial while her writer husband shapes "disaster and human messinese" into "something that would last forever." In other words, she rationalizes her grief by romanticizing Hemingway's talent. While McLain's portrait of this impossible marriage can be harrowing, it can also be frustrating, for Hadley rarely emerges from her wistful cocoon. And though McLain's Hemingway declares his Paris wife "better and finer than the rest of us" - and McLain seems in part to agree - the praise sounds portentously like Nick Carraway's salute to Jay Gatsby. McLain has transformed Hadley into a Mrs. Gatsby not because Hadley is rich or powerful or corrupt but because she is the opposite of all these things. And that means she is hardly more than a stereotype, alas, caught in a world not of her own making. Brenda Wineapple's most recent book is "White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson."