Romance: Katie Fforde v. Trisha Ashley
Jan. 29th, 2022 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
callmemadamIn her new book, out in February, Katie Fforde moves away from cosy British villages to France in the 1960s. Arabella, Annabelle, Artemis - no, her name is Alexandra, is a twenty-year-old orphan who has been left to the mercy of rather vaguely described ‘relations’. Their idea of bringing her up was to send her to boarding school and provide her with a series of governesses or companions. She is living happily in the family home in Belgravia (!) with two girlfriends, while upstairs are David and a couple of his friends. When ‘my relations’ discover that she is apparently sharing the house with a man (gay and lovely), they decide to pack her off to a finishing school in Switzerland. Isn’t she rather old for that? En route, she stops off in Paris, meets a young married woman with whom she strikes up an immediate friendship and in no time is applying for a job with a friend of the friend. What she doesn’t know is that the job is in Provence and her employer a French Comte.
Arriving at the château, she finds three hostile children who say they don’t need a nanny, a vanished housekeeper and nothing to eat but stale bread and cheese. Is she downhearted? Of course not. In no time she has won over the children and is preparing meals. Finding that they don’t go to school and that the youngest can’t even read, she sends for David to tutor them in English and his friend Jack to teach music and maths. David is a wonderful cook and they soon form a happy little household. (These people who love to cook enormous meals for large numbers of people always seem to me the most fantastic element in romantic fantasy. I suppose they do exist.) Papa is often away (and hasn’t he been rather seriously neglecting his children?) but when he arrives, oh dear. Alexandra falls madly in love with him and spends the rest of the book arguing with herself that he’s her employer, he’s too old for her, he has a terrible ex-wife and so on. Did I mention that Alexandra is beautiful and also an heiress? ‘My relations’ pay a flying visit in a Rolls to check up on just what she’s doing and inform the Comte that Alexandra doesn’t come into her fortune until she’s twenty-five, just in case he should be a fortune hunter.
Of course, one gobbles up all the French atmosphere, the château, the delightful characters and the one to hate but the ending is obvious from the moment Alexandra is offered the job in Paris. I can’t understand why the book was set in the sixties; it’s not as if anyone meets Mick Jagger in the local market. Apart from the clothes, I can’t see anything sixties about the way of life. It is, nevertheless, great fun. I read it thanks to NetGalley.
Bizarre thing. I saw Sowing Secrets was 99p for the Kindle. When I looked for it, Amazon told me I had bought it in January 2012! So there, it was, sitting unread; what a treat.
Trisha Ashley’s heroines do lead complicated lives. Take this:
‘Life is slowly getting back to normal. Well, normal apart from my husband being on the other side of the world, the probable father of my only child moving into the village at any second, and my ex-boyfriend bombarding me with romantic messages while ingratiating himself with my daughter in the mistaken belief he is her father.’
Fran March is an artist, living in a village in North Wales with her awful husband, Mal, and her daughter Rosie, when Rosie is home from university. Her wonderfully eccentric mother has a second home in the village. She has two close girlfriends and one male one, who happens to be the lord of the manor. The three played together as children. Rosie is the result of an uncharacteristic one-night stand after Fran had been dumped. She ran away before finding out the real name of the chap involved and remembers only that he was a gardener.
Mal is becoming increasingly controlling and weird and has the nerve to tell Fran she’s too fat and not the girl he fell in love with. That’s grim but worse is to come. There’s a possibility that the garden at the manor may be picked for a TV programme about restoring gardens to their former glory and when Gabe, the madly attractive presenter of the programme turns up, Fran recognises, to her horror, the ‘gardener’ of eighteen years before.
The rest of the book is a game of hide and seek (mostly hiding secrets) until a surprise revelation at the end. The book is full of great characters and very funny; I find Katie Fforde’s books lacking in humour so Trisha Ashley wins. I’ve never read a book by her which I didn’t enjoy, mostly for the slightly wacky characters.
Arriving at the château, she finds three hostile children who say they don’t need a nanny, a vanished housekeeper and nothing to eat but stale bread and cheese. Is she downhearted? Of course not. In no time she has won over the children and is preparing meals. Finding that they don’t go to school and that the youngest can’t even read, she sends for David to tutor them in English and his friend Jack to teach music and maths. David is a wonderful cook and they soon form a happy little household. (These people who love to cook enormous meals for large numbers of people always seem to me the most fantastic element in romantic fantasy. I suppose they do exist.) Papa is often away (and hasn’t he been rather seriously neglecting his children?) but when he arrives, oh dear. Alexandra falls madly in love with him and spends the rest of the book arguing with herself that he’s her employer, he’s too old for her, he has a terrible ex-wife and so on. Did I mention that Alexandra is beautiful and also an heiress? ‘My relations’ pay a flying visit in a Rolls to check up on just what she’s doing and inform the Comte that Alexandra doesn’t come into her fortune until she’s twenty-five, just in case he should be a fortune hunter.
Of course, one gobbles up all the French atmosphere, the château, the delightful characters and the one to hate but the ending is obvious from the moment Alexandra is offered the job in Paris. I can’t understand why the book was set in the sixties; it’s not as if anyone meets Mick Jagger in the local market. Apart from the clothes, I can’t see anything sixties about the way of life. It is, nevertheless, great fun. I read it thanks to NetGalley.
Bizarre thing. I saw Sowing Secrets was 99p for the Kindle. When I looked for it, Amazon told me I had bought it in January 2012! So there, it was, sitting unread; what a treat.
Trisha Ashley’s heroines do lead complicated lives. Take this:
‘Life is slowly getting back to normal. Well, normal apart from my husband being on the other side of the world, the probable father of my only child moving into the village at any second, and my ex-boyfriend bombarding me with romantic messages while ingratiating himself with my daughter in the mistaken belief he is her father.’
Fran March is an artist, living in a village in North Wales with her awful husband, Mal, and her daughter Rosie, when Rosie is home from university. Her wonderfully eccentric mother has a second home in the village. She has two close girlfriends and one male one, who happens to be the lord of the manor. The three played together as children. Rosie is the result of an uncharacteristic one-night stand after Fran had been dumped. She ran away before finding out the real name of the chap involved and remembers only that he was a gardener.
Mal is becoming increasingly controlling and weird and has the nerve to tell Fran she’s too fat and not the girl he fell in love with. That’s grim but worse is to come. There’s a possibility that the garden at the manor may be picked for a TV programme about restoring gardens to their former glory and when Gabe, the madly attractive presenter of the programme turns up, Fran recognises, to her horror, the ‘gardener’ of eighteen years before.
The rest of the book is a game of hide and seek (mostly hiding secrets) until a surprise revelation at the end. The book is full of great characters and very funny; I find Katie Fforde’s books lacking in humour so Trisha Ashley wins. I’ve never read a book by her which I didn’t enjoy, mostly for the slightly wacky characters.
