Review: "A Rural Affair" by Catherine Alliot

Poppy Shilling isn’t quite as upset as one would think when her boring, cycling-obsessed husband dies suddenly after being struck by a free-falling chunk of ice from the sky. You see Poppy had married Phil mostly because all of her friends were being married off, one by one, and he was what was left in the dating pool. There had been no dramatic falling out of love over time, they quite simply hadn’t fit right from the beginning and although she’s sad for the sake of her children, she’s ready to move on. However this chapter won’t be closed quite so neatly. Shortly after her husband’s death Poppy finds herself receiving a visit from a beautiful young woman claiming to have been her husband’s lover for the past four years. Shocked and very angry, Poppy finds herself forced to come to terms with the affair, but matters become worse when the home-wrecker tries staking a claim on her late husband’s insurance policy and assets.

With the help of a few close friends, as well as her eccentric father, Poppy manages to work through the varying stages of grief, anger, and disbelief that follow the sudden revelation of an affair. In the end, Poppy may even find love again.

I’ve been a fan of Catherine Alliot’s for only a little while now. Amazingly, given my love for all things chick lit and British, she was only introduced to me recently. I read A Crowded Marriage and was instantly hooked, and she’s quickly become a favourite of mine. I enjoyed A Rural Affair, but it wasn’t the best of hers that I’ve read. To be honest I found that the middle sagged quite a bit and I felt that it could have been about 100 pages shorter without losing any of the plot. I found myself checking page numbers when I was about half way through and wondering when things were going to pick up a little.

That being said, there were certainly a lot of things to love about A Rural Affair. The beginning was interesting- we get to know Poppy and her children and we find out more background information about Poppy’s marriage and why it wasn’t a match made in heaven. I liked Poppy as a character as well. She was quite matter-of-fact about her marriage and why it hadn’t been working for quite some time, and she seemed able to carry on on her own. I also enjoyed the last several chapters. Everyone seems to get their happy endings, and in some cases people get what is coming to them (I love the odd bit of mild revenge in a plot, don’t you?).

I would certainly recommend A Rural Affair to fans of Jill Mansell or Marian Keyes. It’s a great story with lively characters, just be prepared to skim through the middle a bit. My thanks to Sourcebooks and Netgalley for this review copy.

Review: "Bond Girl" by Erin Duffy

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I picked up my copy of Bond Girl by Erin Duffy. I had flashbacks to a novel that I had read about a year before with a similar premise (woman works in finance, must find a way to survive in a predominantly male work environment) and had, quite frankly, hated. I am not mathematically inclined in any way, shape, or form. Numbers overwhelm me, and finance is not my "thing". I was worried that the book would be filled with explanations that would go way over my head. However, Erin Duffy's clever and interesting debut novel quickly proved me wrong.

Alex Garrett has wanted to work on Wall Street her as long as she could remember. While other girls dreamed of being ballerinas or veterinarians, Alex was determined to become a part of the world of high finance. Her dad was a banker on Wall Street and she always enjoyed going with him to work when he had a slow day. When she gets a job at Cromwell Pierce, one of Wall Street's most esteemed brokerage firms, she is expecting that it will take a while for the men to get used to her. She is expecting to dodge the odd sexist joke or wayward football but she is not expecting to be made to sit in a metal folding chair with the name "Girlie" scrawled across the back for six months, having to pick up pizzas for one hundred people while wearing high heels or having to pay over $1000 for a 50 pound wheel of Parmesan cheese for her boss.

Despite the many setbacks that Alex encounters at Cromwell Pierce, she is determined not to quit. She perseveres, gets to know her boss better as well as the guys that she works with, and suddenly her co-workers refer to her by her given name instead of her nickname, and she has her own desk. When the financial world begins to fall apart and when Alex comes up against a foe that she's not sure that she will be able to defeat on her own, Alex must decide if staying at Cromwell Pierce is worth it anymore or if she should retire her designer shoes for a different sort of life.

I found myself immersed in Bond Girl very quickly. Duffy writes about finance with a light touch. She doesn't dumb it down to the point where the reader feels patronized, but she doesn't throw out terms so complicated that our eyes glaze over. I found myself interested in the way that "the business" works and the insider's look at the trading floor was interesting.

Duffy certainly includes enough about Alex's personal life to interest those of us who enjoy women's fiction. There is a love interest complete with complications as well as a glimpse into the personal relationships that Alex is able to form with her co-workers. Bond Girl is a fast-paced and interesting look at the world of high finance and at one woman who dares to immerse herself in that predominantly male environment. I found myself anxious to find out what was going to happen with Alex next. Especially interesting is the fact that Duffy herself worked in the world of high finance for ten years, so the experiences that Alex had likely mirrored some of Duffy's own.

My thanks to the publisher for providing me with a review copy of this book.

Review: "Point, Click, Love" by Molly Shapiro

Best friends Katie, Annie, Maxine, and Claudia are familiar with love and relationships, but they are not quite as familiar with how the Internet has a way of turning everything that you once knew on its head. Newly divorced and mother of two Katie is done with marriage- or so she thinks. She turns to the world of online dating seeking a partner willing to fulfill her sexual needs without the baggage that comes along with it. Annie always imagined that she would end up living in New York but finds herself far away from the big city with a huge house to call her own but nobody to fill it. Longing for a baby she turns to sperm donation sites online in order to try to fulfill her dreams of motherhood. Claudia, frustrated with the fact that her unemployed husband would rather update his Facebook status than cook dinner or help with their children, begins to seek companionship elsewhere. Maxine, with the seemingly perfect husband and children, wonders why her husband doesn't want to have sex with her anymore and turns to the stories found on celebrity gossip sites for solace.

These four woman find out how the Internet can complicate our already messy lives with just the click of a button, and they will strive to find some kind of balance among it all.

My first thought about this book was how timely the topic is. I met my husband just as online dating began to gain popularity and although I met him because we were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend, now I would hazard a guess that more people meet online than in bars. It's not just online dating though, the Internet has taken over the world! People who go out for dinner spend more time communicating on their phones with other people than actually talking to those in front of them. Don't know what to have for dinner? Google it! People are connecting with distant family members through Facebook and with Twitter you can know exactly what your pals are up to at any given time. I'm not complaining. I've found that being able to connect with like-minded individuals online (hello book bloggers and authors!) has been wonderful. My husband works shift work so when I'm lonely in the evenings after the kids have gone to bed it's great to be able to pop online and check to see how everyone's doing. It does change things, though. People are communicating face to face far less than they used to and it has changed the way that we do everything, from communicating to searching for jobs to cooking to dating. Point, Click, Love takes this idea that the Internet has changed everything around us and it explores how things would change for one particular group of friends.

I did have one small complaint about the book, though. It is fairly short (about 200 pages on my eReader) and I felt that I didn't get enough time to get to know each of the individual characters very well. Point, Click, Love tells the stories of four different women and since they essentially get about 50 pages of storyline each, it took me a bit to get to know which one was which, and it did leave me wanting a bit more from each of them when I reached the end of the book.

The ending was fantastic, though. Each individual story wraps up and the endings are not at all what I imagined that they would be at the beginning. Since I read a lot of chick lit with fairly predictable endings it made for a nice surprise.

Point, Click, Love is a reflection on love, marriage, infidelity and dating in a digital age. This timely tale will leave you reflecting on how things have changed in the past ten years and how they will continue to change in the next ten. My thanks to the author for providing me with a review copy of this book.

The Book Chick Is Moving!

After a month of ups and downs, a veritable roller coaster, the sold sign has gone up on our house! When we found out that we would have to move out of our rental by the end of March so that the owner's son could move in, we panicked. We were planning to buy a house in the next year or two, but we weren't ready yet! It is a big step, to become homeowners, but luckily there are people in our lives who were able to help us navigate the process.

We found and fell in love with this four bedroom, two bathroom home about seven minutes away from our current home. Our sons will still have to change schools, which will be a transition for them, but we will still be close enough to their friends to be able to see them on weekends. I'm steeling myself for the chaos that the next two months will be. We take possession of the house in less than a month now, and will have about two weeks to paint the main floor and get it into move-in ready condition. At the end of March all of our things will be officially moved in and the adventure of home ownership will begin! I'm exhausted already!

Not much will change here on the blog, except I will have even less time for reading than I do right now, meaning that there will be fewer posts. I will most likely not be accepting many review copies for the next two months, but I am hoping to be back in the swing of things starting in mid-April. Two months is a long time to be more-or-less away from the blogging world, given how quickly things change online, but I'm hoping that my blogging friends will come back to visit me when all of this is said and done!

Review: "All There Is: Love Stories from Storycorps" by Dave Isay

One of my favourite fictional love stories of all time is only about eight minutes long. It's the story of lifelong love, what I like to call "forever love", found at the beginning on the movie Up (don't watch this unless you have tissues handy!). If you haven't seen it, I'll summarize it briefly here. A shy boy and an outgoing girl meet as children. Time goes on and the two start as best friends but end up falling in love. The two suffer hardships and disappointments over the years including the fact that they are unable to have children but they remain united through the good times and the bad. The wife falls ill towards the end of their lives but he is with her until the end. Wow. I truly can't do those scenes justice but they have always stuck with me. If only each of us is lucky enough to find this kind of "forever love", to find a partner that will stick with you through the good times and the bad.

All There Is, put together by the founder of StoryCorps, Dave Isay, is a book about "forever love". If you're not familiar with StoryCorps (and being a Canadian, I wasn't before reading this book), they are a group that is intent on preserving our history as people. You can make an appointment to come into one of their locations and bring someone with you whose story you would like to be told. This information is then preserved for future generations. All There Is is a collection of real stories that people have told about love. In the pages of this beautiful book you will find stories about falling in love with someone, about finding love late in life, and about losing the ones that we love. Essentially the book is filled with stories about the kind of forever love that make you believe in humanity again.

I finished this book a few days before Valentine's Day and I was going to tell people that this is a great Valentine's Day gift for the people that you love, but this book's scope goes far beyond that. I am so enchanted with these stories of love that I have already recommended All There Is to my family and my friends, and I plan to re-read my copy again in the future. There is just something about these stories that reminds me how lucky I am to have found a partner that I adore, and reading this book reminded me about the value of having love in your life. As you can probably tell, I recommend this book highly and without reservation. It is a collection of our history as human beings that will benefit those who take the time to read it.

My thanks to TLC Book Tours for inviting me to participate in this tour.

And the winners are.....

Congratulations to the winners of two very enjoyable novels! Lilian has won a copy of Julia's Child by Sarah Pinneo and Kritter has won a copy of Spin by Catherine McKenzie. Winners, check your e-mail for an e-mail from me, and thank-you to everyone who took the time to enter!

Review: "I've Got Your Number" by Sophie Kinsella

It's just weeks before Poppy Wyatt's wedding to the handsome and charismatic Magnus Tavish when disaster strikes- she loses her engagement ring during a hotel fire drill and this particular ring just happens to be an antique that has been in the family for three generations! In the pandemonium following the fire drill Poppy's phone is stolen and Poppy panics as she realizes that now she has no ring and she has no phone number to leave with the hotel for in case the ring is found! She can't very well leave the hotel her home number because she isn't ready for Magnus to know that she's lost the ring, but now her cell phone appears to be gone as well. At the moment that Poppy realizes all of this she spots a phone in the garbage can and claims it as her own. After all, if a phone is in the garbage surely it's up for grabs, right?

Wrong. The phone appears to be connected with a local consulting business and it belongs to the handsome Sam Roxton's assistant, who up and quit just moments before. Against his better judgement, Sam allows Poppy to temporarily keep the phone as long as she promises to forward all of his messages on. What follows is the engaging and often unpredictable account of what could happen when you have access to the personal e-mails and messages belonging to someone that you don't know in real life.

I've long loved the Shopaholic series but have found when reading the most recent installments that I have grown out of them. Becky Bloomwood (Shopaholic's main character) does not seem to have grown up along with those of us reading the series. Luckily for me, Sophie Kinsella is writing standalone novels unrelated to the Shopaholic books that manage to captivate and entertain me from the very first pages. I loved Kinsella's last standalone novel, Twenties Girl, and I loved I've Got Your Number as well. Although our main character Poppy still manages to get herself into some fairly... interesting.... situations, there is a level of maturity present that is not present in other Kinsella titles. I've Got Your Number manages to get it right from several angles. We have a heroine who is likable and who we wish success and happiness for, we have just the right amount of conflict (not only does Poppy lose her engagement ring but she has issues with her future in-laws as well), and we have a handsome romantic hero ready to swoop in and hopefully save the day. Is this the stuff that groundbreaking literature consists of? No, but it's entertaining and well-written chick lit at its finest and I, for one, couldn't put it down.

Kinsella has penned a winner with I've Got Your Number. The book is fun, the characters interesting, and if you're anything like me you won't be able to get a thing done until you've devoured it whole. My thanks to the publisher for providing me with this review copy.