Truthfully, I wasn’t that thrilled Anita Hughes’s other book, Lake Como, but I was dying to travel to the south of France, and elected to try French Coast to get me there! Again, there was a lot going on in this novel. Hughes seems to want to pack in many characters with nearly the same story rather than focusing on one or two plots. Here, there were four separate love stories loosely tied together by Serena, a fashion columnist on assignment in France.
First, we had Serena’s own relationship with her politically driven fiancé who seemed more excited by Serena’s father’s background in politics than with Serena. When the news of her father’s affair that resulted in an illegitimate child surfaced, her fiance broke off the engagement because it would ruin him politically. Wah.
When Serena arrived in France and her hotel reservation was lost Zoe invited her to stay in her suite. Random, but I can see why the author used this to introduce another character. Then Zoe confided in Serena that her father was also cheating on her mother with a younger woman. On top of that, Serena was supposed to interview a famous woman in the fashion industry and learn all about her own affair with a famous writer to use in the article.
Yeah, you see what I mean about too many tangents and story lines. With all these love stories cluttering up the plot, there was little time devoted to actually establishing the passionate love in these stories. So they all seemed unbelievable and superficial. The best thing about this novel was the fashion and the setting. This was a really light read that required absolutely no thought.
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