The Paris Adventures of Judith & Amy

This travel/mystery book starts as an
e-journal of the six month stay in Paris of the mid-career,
well-traveled Judith and Amy. Amy, a rocket scientist from
Pasadena, California, is a visiting researcher at the French
National Laboratories in Paris. Judith, her girlfriend and a
professor of English at a Los Angeles area community college
is on unpaid leave accompanying her. Judith, with the
promise of many visitors and no special projects in mind
aside from learning to speak French, has decided to write an
e-journal to friends and family. Thus, the book is in an
epistolary form, written pretty much in the present tense as
it describes events shortly after they have happened, and
includes photos Judith or friends have taken to illustrate
various points. In addition to Judith's narratives and
photos, edited versions of replies from her correspondents,
which Judith was surprised to receive but felt needed to be
shared in view of her commitment to community, are included
at the beginning of each installment after the first.
Overall, Judith appears only a semi-aware narrator, coming
across a bit as an innocent abroad, yet, at the same time,
is highly self-reflective about language and fills the
narrative with word play, parenthetical references, popular
culture references, high and low culture jokes, and
philosophy. Overall, the tone is one of bemused innocence
(or slight paranoia), and benign irony. Judith's task of
having her journal be something besides the ordinary becomes
simplified when, in time for the first installment, she and
Amy happen to be at the sight of the discovery of a dead
body in a canal near the Bastille. The same evening as the
discovery of the body, Judith and Amy are asked by their
temporary landlady to assist her in securing the contents of
a safe deposit box in Zurich to help her ailing aunt. As
Judith and Amy are heading to Zurich that week to attend the
opening of a sculpture exhibit by one of their friends, it
seems the least they could do to help this older woman. The
body and the visit to the bank sets off a series of events
that embroil Judith and Amy, Judith's French tutor and
fellow students, Amy's French bosses, their French friends,
and American and other visitors in an apparent drug war.
Since Judith is in France illegally and subject to possible
deportation, Amy and Judith are forced to rely only on
friends and their own ingenuity and interpretive powers to
connect the clues and extricate themselves from what
...