Alice Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, tracing their respective paths to a year abroad in Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, that one year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives.