Traveling through Books!
I am on my third book for the summer of 2024. I am reading Summer at the Chateau by Annabel French. I have already left London with Lizzie Summer for France to visit a chateau that she unexpectedly inherited from her great Aunt Sarah. Her journalist boss agrees to let her go and settle the property, if she turns the adventure into a story. She also needs to get away because she has recently been jilted at the altar by her boyfriend, Will. After arriving in France, she finds the expensive chateau in shambles and it looks nothing like the place she visited every summer as a child and teenager.
She thought she would swoop in and put the property on the market within a short time and return to her journalist job in London, but that is not the case. She finds a goat living inside, an open roof with rain leaking on her head and when I bookmarked the page to pause my reading, Lizzie is on her way to look for a hotel in the pouring rain because the chateau is uninhabitable.
Before starting this novel, I first read Dancing in a Distant Place by Isla Dewar. It was a random pick from the public library, but it turned out to be a win-win read. Iris is a school teacher and I automatically related to her because I also taught for many years. She gets a call saying that her husband Henry has been killed in an auto accident. In the midst of her grief, she discovers that Henry had been living a secret life. He had been lying about going to work though he left the house every day. He had lost his job long ago and took to gambling. He had gambled away their home, their insurance policies and was even taking money out of his mother’s purse, though she refused to admit it to herself. The setting for this story is in Scotland and once Iris understands her dire situation, she takes a job in rural Scotland as a headmistress of a small school. The job comes with a small house which is just what she needs to shelter her family, which includes her two teen children.
It turns out to be a highly eventful year because she is the youngest Missie (the village’s name for the teacher) that they had ever had. There are several laugh-out-loud moments as she stands up to the village’s gossip when they assume that two of the locals are her lovers. Her city-oriented teen children also do not cope well with the Peyton Place-like atmosphere and her son acts like his father Henry. He pretends to be going to high school but is really drinking in the local pub and sleeping with his friend’s woman who is much older. Needless to say, Iris is appalled when it all comes to light while her daughter sings songs of doom and depression. They finally move on to Edinburgh at the close of the novel with a few lifetime friends in tow. Dewar is a superb storyteller!
When I left Edinburgh, I went on to London in Penelope Lively’s How It All Began. Charlotte, a senior citizen, is assaulted one day by a teen mugger and it leaves her with a hip injury. Her daughter Rose and her husband Gerry step in and she stays with them for a while as she recuperates. She doesn’t want to be bored so she continues to tutor one of her Adult Education students at Rose’s house. He is a handsome young man from Bangladesh and he and Rose are smitten with each other and they start meeting at parks and museums. That one incident threw a few people together who would not have normally met had their routines stayed the same.
Author Lively uses an interesting technique to show how one mishap can cause a host of unlikely events to take place. Many had to alter their schedules on that one day and an affair starts between Marion and Jeremy; Marion is swindled by a businessman she met while accompanying her uncle, Lord Henry to Manchester and Lord Henry is fooled by an opportunist that he met while the jumbled schedules played out. I traveled through London and even took a train ride to Manchester with Lord Henry and his niece Marion to a conference. Things finally sort themselves out with some heartbreaks and some rearranging of situations but it all mirrors real life.
So, now I will spend some more time in France with Lizzie to see what happens to her. Will she return to London to her job as a journalist with a fantastic story in hand for publication? Will she sell Aunt Sarah’s chateau? Or will she fix it up and decide to stay in France? I will have to scroll ahead and see as I travel through books during this summer of 2024.
Lynn M.
August 3, 2024
