Reviewed by Grant Leishman for Readers' Favorite

Toward the Light: A Year in Paris by Deborah Svec-Carstens is a thoughtful, honest, and refreshingly positive memoir of one woman’s journey to Paris as an American au pair during the early 1990s. The author had just graduated from college and was working alongside her father at an agricultural firm in rural Iowa, as she tried to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. The idea of traveling alone to Paris and working as an au pair for a middle-class French family seemed to hold all the mystery and excitement she yearned for. The reality was to be less than her fanciful dreams, though, as she struggled to find her feet in a foreign city where she had a limited grasp of the language, culture, and family dynamics. The story of her year was dramatically interrupted by a violent sexual assault when she was running in a local park. She would spend the remainder of her time just trying to cope, survive, and move on from the black fear that would grip her whenever she ventured out.

Toward the Light is a quiet, determined recollection of a painful period in the life of author Deborah Svec-Carstens. What impressed me the most about her journey was her determination not to allow the assault and its repercussions to derail her journey. It would have been so easy for her to pack up and head home to the safety of her parents’ embrace and the comfort of her familiar routine. I appreciated how she managed to compartmentalize her feelings despite being at times totally overwhelmed by fear. The relationship she developed with her young charge, despite her early misgivings, was also a highlight of the year she spent in Paris; from the early days, when she was being relentlessly compared to her predecessor, the wonderful previous au pair, Annie, whom she believed she could never match, right through to the confident, loving young woman who would leave Paris with tears in her eyes. I loved the analogy of her trauma to the rebuilding of Reims Cathedral after its bombing in World War I. Like the cathedral rebuilding, her trauma will take an immense amount of time to come to terms with, and life will never be the same as it was before. Her understanding and acceptance of this is what doubtless gave her the strength to go on and develop the future she has. I thoroughly enjoyed this thoughtful, reflective journey and highly recommend this read.