I love Maeve Binchy and all her novels as I love Ireland. I would recommend any book by her!! Loved it! ( )

I don't think anyone has any illusions about Maeve Binchy being a _good_ author, and yet, she's not a very bad one. The people in her stories are all so kind and nice to one another, with interesting backstories, and everyone always gets precisely what they deserve. Having never been to Ireland, I also appreciate the local character. It's fun to virtually visit places. This one is focused around a restaurant - its managers and a group of people who are doing a documentary about it. There's a central story involving a crook and his jilted lover, but it reads like a series of interconnected vignettes - a hundred little lives, all tied together by this restaurant, and the film-to-be. Nice people, nice story. Maeve Binchy is the literary equivalent of watching When Harry Met Sally. You could do worse. ( )

A charming little beach read romance with twists and turns that will keep you turning the pages. You can't help but admire the perseverance of the main character, Ella, as she overcomes her disappointments while always finding love along the way. The author seamlessly intertwines all of the characters and their personal stories together to make a fun and light-hearted read. ( )

Ella Brady has a nice, if quiet, life as a schoolteacher when she meets Don Richardson. She knows he is married, but falls hard for him and is soon having an affair with him. She completely trusts him, believing everything he tells her, and is shocked when he flees Ireland after having conned several people out of their money, including many of Ella's friends and her own father. Shamed, Ella quits teaching and takes on several part time jobs to help her family financially. One job she takes on involves filming a documentary about Quentins, a beloved restaurant in Dublin, which has served many people with quite interesting stories. Ella flies to New York to convince businessman Derry King to invest in the documentary. As she is trying to get the documentary off the ground, she is also struggling with her conscience as to whether or not she should return Don's laptop to him or turn it over to the police who are looking for him. Not an easy decision as she is convinced that Don still loves her.

"Quentins" is a mixed bag. Interspersed with Ella's story are short stories about the patrons of Quentins, a technique that threw me off at first because I had no idea who the characters were that showed up halfway through the book and thought I had missed something. Ultimately, however, the short stories prove more interesting than Ella's story, as she is the type of character that readers will feel like shaking (how she can believe Don still loves her until almost the end of the book is beyond me). I would have liked to know more about some of the minor characters that are in the short stories, especially Quentin himself, who appears far too briefly in the novel.

Several of Binchy's beloved characters appear throughout the book. We learn more about Patrick and Brenda Brennan, who run Quentins, and meet Patrick's brother Blouse. Ria and Colm from "Tara Road" show up, albeit briefly, and Tom and Cathy from "Scarlet Feather" appear as do Simon and Maude, who may be my all time favorite Binchy characters. Aidan and Signora from "Evening Class" show up and Quentins nicely wraps up their love story. These touches are what ultimately make "Quentins" worth reading. ( )

This book just warms the heart. It makes you feel as if you are living the book through it's characters