Thyme Out - Katie Fforde

Title: Thyme Out (also published as "Second Thyme Around")
Author: Katie Fforde
Genre: Chick-lit
Rating: 2.5/5
# pages: 384
Date read: May, 2016

When Perdita Dylan delivers her baby vegetables to a local hotel and finds that her unpredictable ex-husband, Lucas, has taken over the kitchen, she is horrified - particularly when she discovers he's being groomed as the latest celebrity chef and needs her picturesque, if primitive cottage, and her, in supporting roles.

Her life is further complicated when Kitty, her 87-year-old friend, has a stroke. Perdita needs someone to lean on - and Lucas seems so keen to help that she starts to wonder if he's really such a villain. Can she cope with all this alone? Or should she face up to the fact that 'You can't cuddle lettuces'?


It's difficult for me to give this a fair rating, as the different parts of the book were of so very, VERY varied quality.

The first 100 pages infuriated me, and I felt like tossing it across the room. If it hadn't come very highly recommended by people whose opinions I trust, I wouldn't have gotten any further. But I stuck with it, and fortunately it improved, until the last 100 pages, where I had a very had time putting the book down. So with the first 100 pages deserving just 1 star, and the last 100 pages deserving 4 stars, I decided to average it out.

My problems with the book can be boiled down to just one thing - lack of boundaries. In those first 100 pages, Perdita decides she knows better than Lucas how to run his restaurant ("Oh, but she did it for a good cause!" Grrr. So what if she did? That doesn't give her the right! Lucas would have had every right to fire Janey because of it), and Lucas stomps all over Perditia's boundaries not one, not two, but three times. But because he turns around and helps her with Kitty, we're supposed to just forget all of that? In any real-life relationship where somebody behaved like this, I'd call red flags all over the place. Seriously, the "jerk with a heart of gold" trope is getting old. The good things he does later, don't cancel out his jerk'ish behaviour earlier.

*Sigh*

Fortunately after the first 100 pages both Perditia's and Lucas' behaviour improved, and the plot turned a lot more enjoyable, so I no longer considered giving it up as a DNF. I was still slightly disappointed in it, as I'd had it recommended to me as a "foodie novel" which wasn't the case at all - it was a romance, plain and simple. Sure, one of the characters worked in a restaurant, but that part took up a LOT less page-space than I had expected. I also wish we'd have gotten to see Roger's reaction to getting his comeuppance, but that's a minor detail.

All in all, not a book I'd recommend. But if you do end up reading it, try to just ignore the first 100 pages, and the rest of the book will be a lot better for it.