Book Club - February

Written by Peter Mayle

Description from Amazon: 

Beginning, appropriately enough, on New Year's Day with a divine luncheon in a quaint restaurant, Mayle sets the scene and pits his British sensibilities against it. "We had talked about it during the long gray winters and the damp green summers," he writes, "looked with an addict's longing at photographs of village markets and vineyards, dreamed of being woken up by the sun slanting through the bedroom window." He describes in loving detail the charming, 200-year-old farmhouse at the base of the Lubéron Mountains, its thick stone walls and well-tended vines, its wine cave and wells, its shade trees and swimming pool--its lack of central heating. Indeed, not 10 pages into the book, reality comes crashing into conflict with the idyll when the Mistral, that frigid wind that ravages the Rhône valley in winter, cracks the pipes, rips tiles from the roof, and tears a window from its hinges. And that's just January.

In prose that skips along lightly, Mayle records the highlights of each month, from the aberration of snow in February and the algae-filled swimming pool of March through the tourist invasions and unpredictable renovations of the summer months to a quiet Christmas alone. Throughout the book, he paints colorful portraits of his neighbors, the Provençaux grocers and butchers and farmers who amuse, confuse, and befuddle him at every turn. A Year in Provence is part memoir, part homeowner's manual, part travelogue, and all charming fun. --L.A. Smith

This was our book clubs second pick and it received mixed reviews. A few people liked it and felt that it transported them to the French countryside in a relaxing light novel.... the others (myself included) struggled to even read the book. 

I did not like this book, it seemed wordy to be wordy, there were to many descriptors on the countryside and food and not enough on the characters and their lives. I felt like there was random french words thrown in with out explanation. The book is divided into months and after a few they seemed repetitive. The book club found it difficult to even find this to discuss regarding the book. I struggled every night to read this book and in the end could not Finnish it.

I do not give this book a buy...