Review: Second Thyme Around

Second Thyme Around by Katie Fforde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perdita Dylan has a small specialist nursery growing unusual vegetables and herbs for the local restaurants and health club. She is making a precarious living, helped by the fact that her neighbour, Mrs Kitty Ansen, allows her to use her grounds for Perdita's polytunnels.

When delivering her usual daily boxes of vegetables, salads and herbs to the local hotel restaurant she is dismayed to find out that the new chef is none other than her ex-husband Lucas, last seen a decade ago when he was a stockbroker or something equally high-pressured in the City (of London). Perdita was only 18 when they got married and the marriage broke down after Lucas started staying out all night, had an affair with an older woman, and generally behaved atrociously.

Lucas has been offered a pilot TV show and the producers want to use Perdita's tiny, picturesque cottage for filming and have Perdita herself as a side character!

Has Lucas changed and could this be a second-chance romance?

I really enjoyed this, after starting and putting down half a dozen books, including several ARCs which are overdue for a review because the books have already been published, I devoured this in a single day. However, it is a product of its time (first published in 2001 I think).

First there are some dated references to a long-defunct TV show called Changing Rooms (Katie Fforde was clearly obsessed with the show because it seems to feature in so many of her novels).

Second, and this is a particular bug bear of mine with Katie Fforde's novels, she uses the word rape where she means ravish. I truly wish her publisher would just do a search and replace in all her digital books because she uses the word in several books and uses it wrongly. Rape is a violent crime, a violation of a person and to use it to describe a consensual act

And as I didn't cuddle him, only hugged him that time he brought me home after Christmas, and didn't actually let him rape me in the ladies' powder room at Grantly House, I must have pretty much got Lucas out of my system.

is abhorrent to me.

Finally, I was rooting for Lucas until (view spoiler)[he blamed Perdita for the breakdown of their marriage

You didn't fight back, Perdita. You didn't demand that I was faithful, you didn't curse me for bringing colleagues home unexpectedly. You let me get away with murder.

If you hadn't put up with so much bad behaviour, I might have stopped behaving badly.

I'm flabbergasted, why should a wife demand her husband is faithful, it is part of the marriage vows fer crissakes and breaking that is on him, not her! (hide spoiler)].

However, notwithstanding those points, and Perdita's inability to use a mobile phone (again, she's only 30 not 90), I enjoyed this cosy second-chance romance.

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