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Saturday, August 6, 2011

Time off


Some of you might have noticed the slowing down of reviews by me on here over the last few months.  What can I say other then life happens.

We had a series of postal strikes that has left me at times wondering if the books I was to review would ever make it here from their publishers.  Some did.

I also had to make a choice, continue to spend my writing time working on the blogs or working on my own novel.   After spending nearly three full years doing reviews -books and sports- I decided it was time to work on my novel again and to deal with a few of those life issues I had been avoiding.

The last review for now that I offer you is Tout Sweet  by Karen Wheeler.   A memoir she wrote when life got too much and she realized she needed a change.  I can not disagree with the timing of that book coming into my life. It was pure synchronicity.

Please, do check in to the blog in the coming months, as I will be returning.  


Tout Sweet by Karen Wheeler

Plot: Karen has just come out of a bad break up and decides it's time to change her life.  Leaving her career as a fashion editor, she goes to France with a friend for the weekend and ends up buying a house.  Over the course of a year, she travels back and forth from England to France fixing up the new house in bits and pieces until she decides to move there on a full time basis.  Having already established herself within the small village, we are taken into dinner parties, a few unsuitable suitors and the local gossip.  During all this, Karen needs to remind herself that even though her ex-boyfriend is a few hours drive away, he's out of her life for good.

This is a memoir.

As a woman in my late 30's (at the time of this posting)  I fell in step with her choices as I read the book. You understand the pull right off that a new city and a new country had for her at that point in her life.  I thought it was a well designed suggestion that while the author was going through all of this, she kept mentioning a few books about moving to France that she too was reading. I am guessing that Julia Child had something of a role model for her on this regard.

We follow her through about two and a half years of her life as she fixes up her house, learns French and discovers who she can really trust as she learns who she herself really is.

A warm and light touch to what I am sure was a heavy time in the author's life.    I would have loved to have found out just what the real issue between herself and one of the men she writes about, Dave, was. It's hinted at (an over active imagination of a relationship by Dave that never manifested) but never actually confirmed.
Her way of telling you about a pie is done with a flair you would expect from a fashion editor, but also from someone who knows food.  

Karen Wheeler makes you want to take that risk yourself and just move to France.