Book Review: The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller

September 12, 2025

This was also a bit of an overflow from my summer reading list, but don’t you worry, cozy fall reads are headed our way next. I was just close enough to the end, and interested enough to finish, at the end of August, I figured we could do a little overlap. It’s fine.

I am going to be honest, this was a hard book to read. I really enjoyed the writing style, and the storyline was interesting and thought provoking, but it was a hard read. This book features really hard topics like rape, death, divorce, infidelity, and the honesty of growing up a girl. So, if any of that is too much for you, I would probably steer clear of this book, even though it is a good one. I enjoyed reading it, even though there were pretty good chunks that were hard to stomach. Nothing is described with too much specificity, but the thing about the mind is that we have some pretty great imaginations and its pretty easy to imagine what Miranda is talking about, even if she doesn’t spell it out graphically.

We follow the story of a woman named Elle in multiple different timelines. We first meet her in the present, when she is at her family’s cabins by the lake in the Back Woods of Cape Cod. The setting is lovely and peaceful, but it hasn’t always been. There is a lot that has happened on those shores over the the summers, both beautiful and heartbreaking. We jump around to Elle’s childhood, and the life that she lived up until this point and see things the way they were before this year. We get to see who she was as a child and the kind of environment she grew up in with two parents who were unable to keep stable relationships. We see her meet her husband and fall in love, and we see her first love story unfold with her childhood best friend, Jonas, whom she just slept with while both of their spouses were inside the cabin. We read through Elle struggling to decide whether to uproot her life to be with someone she has loved since she was eight, or stay in the marriage she has grown so happy and comfortable in. While it feels like her life is unraveling around her, she is unveiling parts of herself to us through flashbacks and memories from her life.

This book was filled with love and loss and what ifs and family dynamics. Again, I am not sure I would recommend this book, but I did enjoy to very much. It made me feel.