Spoilers Ahead: 
Okay, so to tell you the truth, I really didn’t enjoy this book much at all. I really tried to get into it, and there were some promising parts, but there was just a lot I couldn’t get on board with.

We follow Lizzie as she’s on a cookery course, and she meets two friends, Alexandra and Meg. Lizzie’s mother doesn’t want her to go to London, but Lizzie finds she really enjoys it, and so moves in with Alexandra, and Meg and Clover, Meg’s dog, joins too. She lives with her brother, David, who is into antiques and dealership, just like Alexandra is. 

Before Lizzie moved into Alexandra’s, she was hunting for houses, and met an attractive guy at the flat. It was awful, so she didn’t buy it. She was disappointed that she wouldn’t see him again, only to find out that he was related to Vanessa, a girl on their cookery course. Hugo is Vanessa’s brother. When she sees him at a dinner party, she is shocked, especially when she finds he’s dating a downright distasteful woman, Electra. She doesn’t tell anyone about her crush, though. 

When she meets Vanessa’s parents, they are shocked by her. They think her clothes are too short that it’s indecent, and they’re horrible to her. As Vanessa throws a party, which is taken over by Electra following her recent engagement to Hugo, Lizzie decides she can’t stand to be there anymore, and so tries to escape. She wants to go to the train station, so tries to take a boat and row it across to the station, but it sinks, and she starts to drown. 

Only, luckily enough, Hugo saves her. They go to a nearby cabin to dry off, and they end up getting intimate. She doesn’t think anything of it, until she realises she’s missed her last two periods, so she goes to the doctors. Immediately, her doctor, who’s had her all of her childhood, is disgusted, and when he finds out she is, indeed, pregnant, he tells her parents. 

They’re furious! As this is the 1960’s, they are worried about the shame that will bring on their family. Lizzie is upset, and goes to her friends. She decides to tell Hugo, even after she thought it was a bad idea, and then they decide to get married, to avoid the shame that would follow Lizzie if she decided to keep it and not marry. 

Hugo’s parents are naturally very upset, he had already broken up with Electra, and left his law job, and now this. He was being threatened with being cut off, but he didn’t care. They get the wedding sorted out, and, eventually, everyone is happy with the arrangement. His father goes to see Hugo urgently, the day of the wedding, and Lizzie needs to know if it’s because he wants to pay Hugo to call off the wedding. Lizzie has loved him since first sight, and doesn’t know how he feels. Luckily, he confirms his love for her, and they marry, and everyone is happy. 

This book took me so long to finish, because I just wasn’t getting into it. Firstly, David being gay was mentioned so much throughout the plot that it started to seem like it was only there to diversify the cast. They made it his entire personality, which I thought was very unfair on him, as he’s an excellent character, in my opinion. It’s disappointing, because the inclusion of the diversity was nice, but it felt like it was only there to tick a box, and not enough research was done doing it. It has the same energy as ‘I have a gay friend, so I’m an ally’, you know?

Second of all, the romance itself was a bit weird. It was like ‘I’ve seen this guy once but I’m in love with him, and then she was gonna tell him she liked him even though he was engaged? I just didn’t really feel that they had a connection, especially not that early on. There was more time focused on the plot than actually developing a good relationship, and that works for some books but it doesn’t really in this book. If I’m honest, most of the characters have a questionable personality, and I didn’t like any of them as much as I wanted to, which is a shame, because that possibly might have made the book a lot more enjoyable for me. 

The pacing was truly not very well thought out either. They placed the wedding in the last chapter, and we didn’t get any indication of their relationship after their marriage. Everything just felt very rushed towards the end, which is a bit annoying as we spent most of the book focusing on the plot instead of developing the romance between Lizzie and Hugo. 

I read a lot of Katie Fforde when I was younger, but now being older and able to analyse stuff, I realise that maybe I’ve outgrown her work a little bit.