Review: It's All Greek to Me

It's All Greek to Me by Andrea Christodoulou
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Isme is the second daughter in a Greek-Liverpudlian household. Her mother is full on My Big Fat Greek Wedding whereas her father was adopted and raised as English. Her elder sister is married to George and has twin sons. Isme's mother's mission in life is to get Isme married to a 'Good Greek Boy' with lots of money and she has set her sights on Carlos the son of the local fish and chip shop entrepreneurs, never mind that Carlos takes his fashion sense from the seventies and can't alk about anything but fish and chips!

What Isme really wanted to do in life was bake cakes, but everyone (her mother) said she should get a real job, so she tried to train as a solicitor but failed and now has a job as an admin assistant at the same law firm. A colleague, Zara, is also someone Isme has known since childhood, her parents once owned the business and she is a solicitor there. Although Zara treats Isme as a friend, she isn't averse to poking fun at Isme, and Isme suspects that Zara only pretends to be friendly because she fancies Anthony.

Since they were four years old, Isme and Anthony have been friends, everyone thinks they should get together but as Isme says, when you've wet your pants in front of a boy (even if you were only five) it does tend to preclude romance. Nevertheless, the two of them spend lots of time together drinking, watching Netflix, attending the same Greek church etc.

After a few home truths are spoken, Isme is put on leave and decides to go on holiday with her sister Maria, which morphs into the entire family spending the summer in Corfu at Uncle Stavros' villa, where Isme discovers that there is an ulterior motive for her mother's obsession with her getting married. Now Isme has to decide what she is willing to do for her family.

This was pleasant enough, it felt like a mash-up of multiple books/films I have seen before and what brought it down for me was that frankly there were only two characters I liked (a clue, Isme wasn't one of them). Maybe I'm too old but Isme struck me as very immature.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

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