7th July 2024

I’ve seen this book and its sequels in shops so many times and eventually picked it up in a charity shop.

This is a tale of a bewildered Englishman who runs a B&B in the Loire Valley, who just wants a quiet life, but whose guests seem to be a wild mix of people causing too much excitement to enter his life.

I think my main frustration was that we’re aligned with the wrong character. This means that there’s so much going on that we don’t see, and even when action happens most of it is in the chapter breaks and we just get filled in afterward.

I found the narrative very easy for my eyes to just slide past and so found myself having to go back and find out what I’d missed, which is never a great experience.

There are a couple of moments where I did actually laugh, but eventually I realised I needed to just put the effort in to get the second half done in one sitting so I couldn’t move on to something hopefully more engaging.

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