Fans of Thad Carhart’s bestselling 2001 memoir, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, will be glad to know that his latest book, Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France, offers a similar mix of memoir, history and wonderful digressions about France.

Carhart spent several years of his 1950s childhood in the village of Fontainebleau, France, where his Air Force pilot dad served as a staff officer at NATO (then headquartered at Chateau de Fontainebleau). Finding Fontainebleau’s main narrative follows the family, five kids ages 2 to 12 and their beleaguered parents, as they settled into an immense old house next door to the chateau. Carhart recounts adjusting to to French Catholic school, both its strictures—including Saturday classes—and pleasures—1950s French schoolboys were as crazy for marbles and coonskin caps as American boys. The family’s daily life mixed French and American: They shopped for food at the traditional outdoor market and boulangeries as well as the American military commissary, and had wine delivered (35 cents a bottle); and they piled into their Chevy wagon, heading to Paris for Carhart’s dad’s fencing competitions, and on near-disastrous camping trips in the French countryside and in Spain and Italy.

The book’s other narrative gives us a lively history of Chateau de Fontainebleau, built in 1137 as a hunting lodge, then added on to by successive kings, queens, and two Napoleons. Carhart takes us into closed-off rooms, where architects, carpenters, and other craftsmen work at restoration. He sees the rambling chateau, with its idiosyncratic additions, as a more fitting symbol of France than the more well-known Versailles.

Throughout, Carhart turns his observant eye on small, sometimes odd-seeming details—the once-ubiquitous Turkish toilets in cafes, the uniquely French method of taking household inventory, French cars of the 1950s. These lovely digressions, along with Carhart’s own family’s story, illuminate French culture in an appealing way. 

What child would not long for a secret password that opens a magical door? At age 3, Claire Hoffman was given just such a word—a mantra she believed was created just for her. It provided entry into the intense spiritual world inhabited by her mother, a practitioner of transcendental meditation (TM). Hoffman’s thoughtful memoir, Greetings from Utopia Park, chronicles a childhood immersed in TM and the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as well as the adult reckonings that followed. 

From a trailer on the campus of the National Headquarters for Heaven on Earth in Fairfield, Iowa, Hoffman watched the Maharishi’s quest for world peace through meditation rise and fall outside her bedroom window. Her story could be yet another tale of growing up in and escaping a religious cult, but she is careful to note not only the heartbreaking ways her innocence was taken from her, but also the life-affirming sense of community and purpose she gained in Fairfield. 

This balanced approach, likely related to her career as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, sets Hoffman’s story apart from more simplistic retellings. She never pulls punches in the personal arena—young Claire’s unchecked enthusiasm comes through as clearly as her adolescent skepticism.

Although she analyzes the social and historical influences on the Maharishi’s movement, in the end, Hoffman’s story is intensely personal and spiritual. When she goes back to gather the threads of meaning that remain for her in TM, we understand that she has reached a new kind of transcendence, one that accepts uncertainty without giving up hope.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.