Review: Summer at the French Café

Summer at the French Café by Sue Moorcroft
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two and a half stars.

I must preface this review by saying that while I generally love Sue Moorcroft's UK-based novels I have a less enthusiastic relationship with her novels set abroad, despite that I requested this book when it came up on NetGalley.

Kat(erina) Jenson works in a bookshop come café in Parc Lemmel in Alsace, France. The owners Reeny and Graham were very kind to her when she first moved to France, giving her somewhere to stay etc, and she has been fiercely loyal ever since. Now Reeny has cancer and Graham's mother is ill in the UK so the task of managing the bookshop falls squarely on Kat, which she relishes.

Kat's stepbrother Solly has recently also started work in the park, after being sacked as a teacher for drunken rowdiness on the school steps, as a groundskeeper. Kat and Solly have not been close previously as Solly's mother Irina has always made it clear that she is jealous of any time that Kat spends with Solly, or her father Howard even though Kat only saw her father at weekends. Even Kat's mother showed her less attention when she remarried, prioritising her new husband's young daughters who were traumatised at their mother's death. Then after her own mother's death, her step-father and his daughters moved away, leaving Kat all alone.

Kat hasn't had much time to spend with Solly so far as she has been too engrossed with her French boyfriend Jakey, until shocking truths are revealed about who he really is.

Despite her heartbreak and shock, Kat soon finds herself attracted to Solly's housemate Noah, who has moved to Alsace from the Dordogne to try to find his ex-wife Irina and daughter Clemence who abruptly up and left with his ex-wife's new (controlling) husband Johan with no notification. But given her history of being thrown over for other people and their children, will the situation with Noah be any different?

Sorry, I tried to like this but I found it incredibly slow. Also, Kat was such a victim of absolutely everyone she knew that I started to feel that maybe she was partially to blame, like those people who are 'bullied' at every single job they have - at some point you have to ask are they oversensitive or are they themselves acting unreasonably and getting upset when they are called out on it?

I've said it before but this time I mean it. No more overseas romances from Sue Moorcroft for me.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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