farm fatale

farm fatale
wendy holden
fiction/brit chick lit
headline books publishing
published 2001

Cash-strapped Rosie and her boyfriend Mark are city folk longing for a country cottage.  Rampantly nouveaux-riches Samantha and Guy are also searching for rustic bliss - a mansion complete with all the fancy trappings.  The village of Eight Mile Bottom seems quiet enough, despite a nosy postman, a reclusive rock star, a glamorous Bond Girl, and a ghost with a knife in its back.  But there are unexpected thrills in the hills, and the two couples are soon swept up in various romantic entanglements, mix-ups, slip-ups, and unlikely seductions in their search for ever-greener pastures.

What to say....what to say.....

I didn't love this book, but then I didn't hate it either.  It was just....there.  Rosie wasn't that bad of a character, but I never really got a sense of who she really was.  I definitely got a sense of other characters.  Like Samantha and Mark.  Awful, awful people.  I don't understand at all why we were stuck in Samantha's head at all.  I kept waiting for the moment when something changes for Samantha, when she realizes she's a horrible person, but that never comes.  From the synopsis I was expecting a much different couple.  The story would have been just fine if she was never in it, albeit much shorter.

Everything kind of dragged on and then suddenly took this sharp turn and as the pages flipped away with very little pages left to read I wondered how things were going to get wrapped up.  Holden wrapped everything up in about 7 pages.  It was kind of disappointing.  And predictable.

I still have two other books by Wendy Holden to read for the off the shelf challenges.  Hopefully they'll be a little better than this one.  I'm generally a sucker for brit chick lit, but this one didn't thrill me.