This book was a delight. The way the author chooses to ‘show’ a character rather than ‘tell’ is wonderful. To illustrate the character of the protagonist, a workaholic London lawyer up for partnership, is to have her unwillingly in a relaxation spa filling out a questionaire about her stress level. She presses so hard on the pen she rips the paper denying she feels any stress at all. Kinsella writes the most amusing characters whose self-delusion is the funniest part about them.
Samantha Sweeting is a crackerjack career woman raised by another crackerjack career woman. Work is all. She has no life, no friends and just one real friend. Sex comes in six minute incriments, when she can find time for what she thinks are ‘relationships’. She’s on the road to achieving all she ever dreamed of and worked toward and just as she gets it, she loses everything. Because of a catastrophic error she made, 50 million dollars is lost and Samantha finds herself suddenly fired with her career in total smoldering ruins. She wanders out of the office in shock, lets a crowd moving onto a train sweep her along in a daze. When the train stops in a bucolic Cotswald village she gets off having had several cocktails and now plaqued with a vicious headache. She stumbles to a big, beautiful house to beg for a drink of water and a couple of asprin. She is mistaken for an applicant for a housekeeper position and after being given a couple of pain-killers on top of the alcohol, she finds her competitive spirit aroused by the possibility she won’t get this job and before she passes out, she is now a housekeeper presumably with Cordon Bleu cooking training.
The complitcaion? She can only boil water and make toast. Her idea of how to deal with getting new vacuume cleaner bags that her housekeeper asked for is to order a new vacuume cleaner because it will come with bags.
The love-interest? Nathaniel, a local man who works for her employers as a gardener but who also owns three pubs and dreams of owning a nursery. He takes pity on her hilarious attempt at cookery and gets his mum to teach her how to cook and clean on her days off.
The transformation? Samantha finds she likes having weekends off, evenings free, the freedom to have a real relationship and that sex that takes much longer than six minutes is far superior to what she’d know before. The sex scene in the garden with the raspberries and the gardener on a hot summer night is delicious, by the way. She discovers a slower pace, the fact that the world is a beautiful place and that stars are incredible in the night sky. She takes pride in her work, in the things she cooks and the way she does things. She is happy for the first time in her life.
The plot twist? She discovers that she didn’t make the error that got her fired, after all. When all is revealed and she is offered her old life back with more than she ever dreamed she could achieve, does she go back and claim her laurels or she she stay and clean the loos?
I found I laughed till I cried and coughed and nearly had to run to the loo. I wept. I really cared about the characters. Her wealthy but clueless employers, their pompous lawyer niece, Nathanial’s sweet mother and the inhabitants of the perfect village we all wished we lived in. I wish I had never read it, so I could have the pleaure of reading it all over again for the first time.
- Goodreads rating – 3.85
- REVIEW – Laurel