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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Love afloat!,
By
This review is from: Going Dutch (Hardcover)
"Love isn't always plain sailing" although in "Going Dutch" it's not sailing but motoring in a barge that underpins the story. Jo has recently separated from her husband Philip after he took up with a much younger woman and is renting a barge as accommodation while she works out what to do with her life. She's had no job apart from bringing up her daughter Karen, now living in Canada, and can't face being with the people in her village and seeing her husband's younger, thinner girlfriend.
Dora has just broken off her engagement to John, her boyfriend of four years, and at twenty two isn't sure what to do next - although she is sure she can't live at home and deal with all the recriminations and village talk. So when her best friend Karen suggests she lodges on the barge with Jo this seems like a great opportunity. Perhaps Dora can find a job in London and pick up the threads of a new life. Jo and Dora get along very well and are soon making friends and getting involved with other people who live on other barges. Dora meets Tom, a young man who works at the boatyard but wants to go travelling. Theirs is just a friendship, of course, but Tom's doing his best to help Dora grow in confidence and do new things and perhaps she's finding his friendship more important to her than she had thought. Jo meets up with Marcus, someone she knew thirty years before whilst she was engaged to Philip, and when they discover that the barge needs to go to Holland for some maintenance the barge owner hires Marcus to skipper it across the channel. Marcus's girlfriend comes along for the ride but is there something more going on between Marcus and Jo than she is aware of? Going Dutch is Katie Fforde's thirteenth novel and is very like her others in tone and feel. It's a comfortable, cosy read with lots of quintessential Englishness (people always drinking tea) and some very interesting descriptions of life on a barge - both stationary and travelling. However in some ways this book was a little disappointing; it took rather a long time to get going and although the section about crossing to Holland is interesting the main characters seem to spend more time making cups of tea than anything else. Some characters seem rather one-dimensional, particularly Carole, Marcus's girlfriend, and Susanna, the new girlfriend of Jo's husband. There is a strange emphasis on the fact that Jo and Dora are middle class although they speak and behave in a rather more upper-class fashion and the regular reference to their class didn't seem to fit. Jo, for example, after an hour's conversation with an expert, is able to restore antiques well enough to make a living out of it; Dora gets a day at the races courtesy of her father - these don't seem like usual English middle class pursuits to me. The boating aspect of the story gave it a lot of charm but also sometimes meant that the story dragged. The actual romance part of the book seemed tacked on at the end, particularly for Jo, with no real exploration as to whether she would be happy with Marcus. Tom and Dora's instant friendship is understandable on her side (she's lonely for company her age) but not entirely on his - it's not clear what he sees in her initially. There is rather a lack of realism in many of the events - Jo's antique restoration, as mentioned before, and Dora's ability to get a job instantly in the boatyard without even being interviewed. It's an easy book to read and the characters are appealing, particularly Jo as she comes to terms with being in her fifties and single again, but the book drags a little in places and the relationships between the women and their men aren't well enough developed to please this picky reviewer. Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Helen Hancox, 2007
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Romance on a barge,
By
This review is from: Going Dutch (Hardcover)
When Dora decides not to go ahead with her planned wedding with her long time boyfriend, she outrages her mother and most of the people in her village, so she escapes to stay with Jo, the mother of a friend and moves in with her on to a barge moored on the Thames. Jo has just been dumped by her husband of many years for a much younger model, and is feeling very unloved and vulnerable. The barge on which they are living has to be taken to Holland for technical reasons and so they join a group of men who are expert in sailing these unwieldy vessels across the sea to their new port. Romance blossoms between Jo and an old acquaintance and also between Dora and a handsome young deck hand and so a pleasant story emerges, but M/s Fforde's style of writing, although easily read, seems to be written at a rather juvenile level which I thought could probably be classed as "young adult fiction". It's a nice enough book but didn't grab my attention at all.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Haven't we seen this before?,
By
This review is from: Going Dutch (Paperback)
I'm a huge fan of Katie Fforde, having discovered her work in a library where boaters hike or bike up from the docks in to town and trade their paperbacks for ones they haven't read, to while away the next leg of their journey.
Fforde works on the principle of writing what you know, and I understand she and her husband have had quite a lot of experience in intercoastal barge boating. These barges are narrow, deep keeled boats, rather too cramped to be comfy on overnights, unless you have the second craft (your sleeping quarters). The trick is navigating two boats in tandem on waterways not always spacious. But there's a charm to personal travel by water quite different from that of cruise ship water life. You meet people in a different way, too (such as the folks from all over the world who show up at waterside town libraries to swap reading material). This is the third or fourth story of this sort for Fforde, I think. Not to spoil it for readers, but the women are usually paired one older, one younger, or one experienced and one novice sailor. And they're on the lam from some broken relationships. Often one of the pair is quite ditzy but well to do. She may be out to prove herself to her family left behind, or to herself, perhaps. She and her cabin mate encounter quirky mishaps and manage to triumph with an odd combination of femenist 'spunk' and femenine wiles. They discover new or previously unnoticed men of interest and go off into the sunset severally, with same. Like Betty Neels, Fforde's works are comfortable reads, with predictable endings. The fun is often in seeing how the writer will manipulate her plots and characters to get them to the happily ever after. Most refreshing, for the older reader is, Fforde's characters are not always young things with gorgeous bodies. One tends to be younger, one older, thus leaving no potential reader without a party to root for. The younger is all too often a bit scatty, but gorgeous or potentially gorgeous. She and the older character develop a friendship, and she spiffs the older one up so they're both more gorgeous (or in some other way more marketable as mates, second or first). Katie Fforde's characters are endearing. Her humor is predictable, and yes, there is a lot of tea drinking, but if you don't like that, substitute coffee or soda or whatever you like to get together with your friends and do. The fact that so many complain, suggests to me we don't 'do' hospitality much anymore. Still, I can't see much room for plot advancement if the characters get together to text or twitter, can you? This writer can do more. She can branch out to deal in other backgrounds than the boatyard! I'd recommend some titles, but her books tend to be renamed and reprinted with different titles in the US and the UK. MOre than once I've bought something in the 'used' listings only to find I've read it already. Maybe I've seen this plot too many times, or maybe this book is one I've read before under another title?
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