VIDALIA IN PARIS

Watson’s supple, low-key first novel distills beautifully the feelings of excitement that a young art student experiences when in Paris for the first time. On an art scholarship in Paris with her East Hampton, N.Y., high school for the summer, Vidalia Sloane is delighted to meet two potential boyfriends almost instantly. Julien is a clerk at the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookstore, truly kind and a good listener; Marco is the charismatic friend of her chilly host family, whose involvement in the art world is on the shady side. Uneducated but daring, Marco thinks of himself as a kind of Robin Hood and persuades the smitten young woman to steal art with him. However, as a developing artist herself, Vidalia begins to suffer pangs of guilt. She works to sort out her conflicting feelings for Marco even as she struggles to prove her independence from her rather neurotic, agoraphobic mother and to navigate art classes and messy friendships back home. Watson portrays Paris with a doting accuracy and delineates all the torments of first love. (Fiction. 12 & up)