One Hot Summer ~ Kat French
Possibly one of my favourite chick-lit novels, I can’t believe I read this in 2017: I truly could not bear to put this book down! So many characters were fabulously eccentric. I’m a sucker for the ‘village’ setting which means that everyone knows each others nusiness!
Our heroine – Alice McBride – was a wonderful mixture of fragility and strength, and the love interest (US country singer Robinson Duff) was such a romantic, slightly damaged, chivalrous hunk I was half in love with him myself!
I couldn’t begin to describe the plot and do it justice, but an English village setting during a heatwave instantly makes it a great summer read. The story starts with double heartbreak and follows Alice and Robinson’s coping mechanisms of either running away or embarking on a project to get their lives back on track.
I adored Stewie who’d been a 70s porn star – with his many wigs and outrageous outfits. The mynah bird owned by the local ‘white witch’ almost stole the show, a great source of humor and secret-spilling.
Robinson is as gentle and thoughtful as one could wish – the textbook gallant southern boy, but his attempts to forget all about Nashville and his stellar career are fairly unsuccessful.
Alice is enchantingly loyal to her home, Bourne Manor, bearing a duty to be its custodian for years to come, no matter what sacrifices she must make. The pair vow that this will be nothing more than a HOT holiday romance and that they won’t get involved – we don’t want to believe a word of it!
Read this novel to evoke all the ‘summer holiday feels’ you would normally get from devouring a book beside the pool or on the beach
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