Oh, I so wanted to like this book. It’s Katie Fforde! She lives practically down the road from me (OK, about 20 miles away); she pops up on my local BBC radio station regularly, she’s lovely, how could I not like one of her books.

And yet.

This was Fforde’s first novel, published in 1995, and as her website states, it was her first attempt at a full-length novel after trying to write for Mills & Boon. Sadly, the M&B influence is a little too strong. Most of the book is actually quite decent, endearing, humorous, but the central characters, the two that you just know are going to end up happily ever after, have the most incredibly dysfunctional relationship. I think it may have been an attempt to inject a bit of a Lizzie Bennet/Mr Darcy element, but for me, it totally fails. In books with a romantic element, the reader generally wants to believe in the “happily ever after”; with this couple, I can’t see them lasting a year. And as for the sex scenes, I note that Fforde’s 2018 novel A Country Escape left much more to the imagination, which I hope means she realised she couldn’t write sex scenes very well. ( )