Catherine Alliott

Catherine Alliott is an author who has been on my radar for a while and I have a number of her books in my collection but, rather shockingly, A Cornish Summer is the first one that I have read. Such is the curse of so many books so little time.

A Cornish Summer is different from books that I would usually read in that it is more of a family saga. Flora heads to Cornwall to paint a portrait of her ex-father-in-law, taking along her friend, Celia, for moral support. It's just as well she took show more Celia with her as she didn't expect her ex-husband and his wife to be there also. I really felt for Flora having to cope with seeing her ex-husband when she makes no secret about the fact that she is still in love with him. That's not all she has to cope with though...enter the overbearing ex-mother-in-law FROM HELL. Belinda is a total bitch and even her own grandson agrees with me!

What starts out as a lighthearted slow-burning tale, actually turns slightly darker and more sinister with a very strong and well told environmental message. It's very current in this day and age as we are being made aware of the devastating effects of pollution, plastic or otherwise. With private companies striving to make a profit to keep their shareholders happy, it's very possible that they would cut corners at the expense of the environment. I found this so scarily realistic and, as heartbreaking as it was to read, it never hurts to remind people to help save our environment.

With all family sagas there are plenty of skeletons in the closet, some more firmly in the closet than others. I loved the fact that Flora's ex-father-law, Roger, has a not so secret mistress who is fun-loving, young at heart and the complete opposite of his wife. Bubbly Babs is clearly the love of Roger's life but he is forced through social convention to keep up appearances with Belinda the Bitch. Roger isn't the only one with secrets though...

Escape to Cornwall with A Cornish Summer; it's the perfect book to read as you lounge in the sun with a pitcher of Pimm's.

I chose to read an ARC and this is my honest and unbiased opinion. show less

I have long been a fan of Catherine Alliott. I don't remember exactly how I discovered her books but I do know that I have been reading them so long that I used to have to buy them online from overseas and have them shipped here. And they were and are the kind of delightful Brit chick lit that made the extra effort well worth it. Alliott's latest, A Rural Affair, is the same kind of entertainment that her previous books were and as such was a fun and frothy way for me to spend a day.

Poppy show more Schilling is a married mother of two and if her marriage isn't perfect and her husband is demanding and distant, well whose life is everything she's ever dreamed? But Poppy isn't one to walk away from her less than fulfilling life. She just fantasizes sometimes about Phil the paragon's untimely death. So when she finds two men at her door telling her that Phil has in fact been killed while out on one of his incessant cycles, crushed by a chunk of frozen pee that detached itself from the underside of an overhead jet, well, she is understandably gobsmacked and maybe just a little bit relieved.

Poppy mourns more for the loss of a father for her children than she does for her husband, despite the fact that Phil was never much of a father for their kids anyway. As Poppy is trying to adjust to her new life, she starts getting more involved in the life of her bucolic little village, mainly at the behest of her worried friends, joining the local church choir, helping start a book club, and going out with the local hunt (each of these to generally hilarious effect). But when her doorbell rings and the woman standing there tells her that she was Phil's long-time mistress, it causes her to examine everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage, and Phil himself.

As a character, Poppy is kooky and often times off-balance. She is a complete klutz and gets herself into entertaining and giggle-worthy situations. The death of Phil and his stifling influence allows Poppy to spread her wings and be herself. As if she's not got enough on her own plate coming to terms with widowhood and the revelation of Phil's other life, she is a supportive and devoted friend and gets embroiled in her friends' complicated lives as well. Add to that a bit of a burgeoning crush on the solicitor handling Phil's will and you have the makings of a first-rate romantic comedy. The pacing is even and the pricking tension of what will happen with Phil's mistress contesting his will keeps the reader turning the pages as much as Poppy's embarrassing and crazy situations and the slight whiff of a potential romance do. Good fun all the way around and if the ending is a bit rushed and more than a little predictable, it is exactly the sort of ending the happy reader wants to see so it is entirely forgivable. show less

DNF at page 201 of 468.

I picked up this and the last book I read a few months ago but never got around to reading. One of my resolutions is to get through the glossy pile of books I have not read yet on my shelves (there are a lot of them) so I started going through the pile. Frankly I want to kick myself since so far the books I bought are not that great to me.

I wish that I could get engrossed more in Imogen's story. However, from the parts I read, this character just seems to have built show more her husband up on a pedestal and excuses all of his faults which look to be legion to me at this point. When you find out the history of how Imogen and her husband got together I ended up losing a lot of sympathy for her since she is super naive.

The writing at times flows, and other times gets clunky. I think that since the author chose to slowly reveal things to the reader actually hurt a bit for this story since you go from feeling for Imogen, to thinking how dumb she is when you go back and see what happened in the past. Not going to lie, I totally skipped to the last two chapters to see if I had called where the book was going to end up when I finally decided to stop reading the book. I was correct on all of my assumptions. show less

This is a story all about lies. Big lies, little lies. Lies to yourself and lies to your family.

I have to admit, that I was bowled over by the shocking admission that happens towards the end of the story. I, as a reader, had been suckered into the lies that Hattie had managed to weave around her life, and when I read it, I was as shocked as the characters in the story.

And that is why I loved this story. It was gritty, it was life, it was fantastic, and was real. Hattie had spent a lifetime show more telling herself lies to make herself feel better, and while they didn’t unravel, it struck a chord, because often we tell ourselves lies in order to feel better about ourselves and our lives.

Hattie as a character was shallow to start with; a married man that she had left and mourned for the rest of her young life; with a younger man that she told herself she wasn’t serious about; an adopted son that she adored, a thriving business, but there was something missing. By the end of the story you knew what was missing. And so did Hattie. After years of lies, she finally found the truth. show less