Artistic License - Softcover

Fforde, Katie

3.68

2,913 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312339364 ISBN 13: 9780312339364

Publisher: Griffin, 2005

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There’s an art to choosing men, but Thea’s just discovering it. A wonderfully romantic novel from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Recipe for Love, A French Affair and The Perfect Match.

Fed up with looking after a houseful of students, Thea Orville throws caution to the winds and takes off to Ireland with Rory, a charming but feckless artist.

But Thea's old life isn't so easily cut off. The arrival of Molly, her bossy friend, demanding to see Rory's stunning paintings (and to find out what Thea is up to) is bad enough, but why did she have to bring Petal, Thea's most annoying lodger, along for the ride? And worst of all, Petal is accompanied by her uncle, the enigmatic Ben, a man Thea has sworn never to like.

The timing is terrible - Rory's dog is about to have puppies - but even more alarming is that the more Rory pursues Thea, the more maddeningly attractive she finds Ben...

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Review:

Thea, the heroine of Katie Fforde's Artistic Licence, is a disorganised 35-year-old whose life is going nowhere. Or that is how it appears to her student lodgers--whom she unwittingly mothers--and to her older friend Molly, a lady of leisure with a missed vocation as a chief executive. When Thea jets off to Ireland on a whim to stay with the devastatingly good-looking artist Rory, all her friends from her new hometown of Cheltenham are appalled. Equally, when Thea, on seeing Rory's heart-wrenchingly beautiful landscape paintings, decides to set up an art gallery in provincial west of England, her friends cannot believe what they are hearing.

Katie Fforde makes clear that Thea knows what she's doing, and that her chaotic and messy lifestyle is her own conscious choice. Her determined resistance to the persistent Irish charmer Rory--he's too young, she doesn't have casual affairs--and the apparent ambivalence of Ben, a divorced and know-it-all artistic director of an ad agency, sets up a plot where the embryonic art gallery and Thea's accompanying search for a more satisfying life form centre stage, making any love interest incidental. Olivia Dickinson

Review:

"Can be scoffed at one sitting ... Tasty" (Cosmopolitan)

"Joanna Trollope crossed with Tom Sharpe" (Mail on Sunday)

"The romance fizzes along with good humour and is a good, fat, summery read" (Sunday Mirror)

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