Review: The Mid-life Trials of Annabeth Hope

The Mid-life Trials of Annabeth Hope by Alice G. May
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Annabeth Hope has been left by her husband to look after his three teenage children from his first marriage and their young daughter in a ramshackle farmhouse in the New Forest, with no job and no child support she has been quietly selling off shares left to her by her parents to pay the mortgage and keep them fed, along with the menagerie of animals her family have gathered. However, her stepchildren are hostile, she doesn't really have any friends in the village, and life is getting on top of her.

Rick Mahon is an over-worked and harassed London GP. A walk-in patient to whom Rick prescribed medication mixed it with recreational drugs and is in a coma, he is a semi-famous Tik-Tok gamer with a high social media profile. There is no evidence that Rick warned the patient not to take any other drugs with his medication and the patient's mother is all over social media declaiming Rick. She is threatening to sue which could ruin Rick and destroy his career. Counselled by his partners to leave London and let the furore die down (paparazzi are trying to force their way into the surgery), Rick decides to decamp to the property his uncle left him in the New Forest.

Rick first meets Beth when he gets lost in the New Forest and comes across her trying to change a flat tyre. Later they discover that they are neighbours. Despite the immediate attraction neither of them has the bandwidth for a relationship, yet they keep getting thrust into each other's paths.

I loved this, but yet again I felt the ending was too abrupt and if I'm being really picky everything miraculously resolved itself a little too easily, but it was a fun read, reminiscent of Katie Fforde.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

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