Azur Like It

Azur Like It is the story of a lost girl, Kate, from a small Northern English town who isn't happy with much of anything. She writes for a local newspaper and lives at home with her hard father, caring mother and knitting crazed grandmother. She can only think about going to France to report on the film festival and a romance novel that she is writing. She makes it to France and this is when her whole life turns upside down. Her love turns, her life turns and her friends turn. She is pushed to move on her own two feet and grow as a person. You see the character changing in a magnificent and realistic way.The story takes an adventures change and becomes more of a mystery that has you rooting for Kate and her friends. This is a wonderful story that I would highly recommend!

Wendy Holden has great fun with British brand and place names: the country village in FARM FATALE was called Eight Mile Bottom, the publishing firm in GOSSIP HOUND Hatto & Hatto (v. Chatto & Windus), and now, in AZUR LIKE IT, the grotty burg of Slackmucklethwaite, to which hapless heroine and budding journalist Kate Clegg has been consigned since birth.Holden's place names are over the top, and so are most of the characters in this farcical picaresque tale of a girl, her ambitions, and the comic winds that blow her across the Channel and into the midst of the glitterati making their yearly pilgrimage to the Cannes Film Festival. Almost everything that happens is completely unlikely, from Kate's tryst with young-roué-down-from-university Nat Hardstone in his recently and cheesily redecorated room (his outlandish stepmother has hired a decorator du jour who disguises lack of expertise with yardage and drapery pins) to her being hired in a small French town by a fabulously rich elderly widow with a mansion stuffed with priceless works of art.About the only thing that rings true in Kate's life is her home life, where her salt-of-the-Midlands parents and grandmother offer lots of tea, toast and a hefty dose of reality (not to mention many oddly knitted garments from Gran). Having overdosed on pots of Typhoo and slices of cake, the somewhat plump Kate sublimates her romantic notions in a perfectly dreadful manuscript (Northern Gigolo) that she keeps tucked beneath her mattress.After Nate seduces Kate for the slimy purpose of getting her to purchase airplane tickets to Cannes for the two of them, she thinks she's finally off to Cannes to cover the film festival for the Slackmucklethwaite Mercury (which locals dub "The Mockery"). Given the pickle Kate finds herself in, with no press credentials worth a franc and no francs to spare, it's no wonder Holden allows her latest working-girl protagonist to fly off and experience a fairy tale.As Kate gradually gets her "sea legs" by the seashore, she finds out that small towns work pretty much the same way no matter what language is being spoken, and she learns that she's nowhere near as dependent on hearth and home as she had believed for her twentysomething years. She also uncovers a real-estate scandal connected not only to dear old Slackmucklethwaite, but also to Holden's dear old stock character, professional celebrity Champagne D'Vyne. Not one of the plot twists seems probable, but that's hardly the point.Reading a Wendy Holden novel is much like entering what the English call a "Wendy house" (after the tiny shack the lost boys construct in Peter Pan): the proportions are completely wrong for ordinary life, but they all work together in their own eccentric way. Holden has so much fun with her silly place names, puns, and witty dialogue that it scarcely matters whether or not Kate has grown as a character --- because the reader is having lots of fun, too. --- Reviewed by Bethanne Kelly Patrick