Book excerpt: In 1950, as many families were establishing lives in suburbia, Mary and Frank Littell decided to uproot their young family from the comfort of their home in the United States and move to France for a year. Now, decades later, their son John S. Littell, who was four years old at the time of their French exploration, brings his mother’s journals to life and tells the story of living in the working-class town of Montpellier from her perspective. French Impressions: The Adventures of an American Family chronicles one family’s adventures abroad, as Mary struggles to maintain a home in a new culture and to cook the local cuisine, while Frank traverses to various bars and nightly reads Great Expectations to his toddlers. These often comedic and heartening familial struggles will at once seem familiar and lost to the times gone by.