First published 2023. Embla paperback, 2023, pp 309, c.105,000 words.
As a male I’m unlikely to be the target market for books like this, but that doesn’t stop me enjoying a well-told tale. Here is a straight-forward romance set aboard a luxury motor-yacht chartered for a week’s cruising in the western Mediterranean. This setting is very much upstairs/downstairs, with the very wealthy customers closely quartered with the boat’s crew, who are there to ensure the guests’ every want is met.
It is mainly told from the perspective of Bella Mason, who is in her mid-twenties and has previously worked in high-end hotels. She has recently been appointed First Stewardess; the career direction change prompted by her desire to see more of the world. Unfortunately, the second stewardess thinks she should have Bella’s job, and they are sharing a tiny crew-cabin for the summer. Also Bella suffers from sea-sickness, something she didn’t know before she took the job.
The customers are led by Felicity Kennedy, a fabulously successful Hollywood and TV actress, who has brought along friends and family to celebrate her husband’s birthday. Included in the party is Leo, Felicity’s much-loved nephew, a polo-playing, thirty-year-old, well-toned charmer. OK, so the ending seems obvious, but what about all the twists and turns along the way? And are our initial impressions of the characters to be born out? Much fun is had with all the shenanigans of misunderstandings, double crosses, ego-trips, and good and bad behaviour. The boat provides a pressure-cooker where it is hard to keep a secret, escape from an enemy or avoid a spurning love-object. Below-decks has just as much of a power structure as in the customers’ suites.
There are loving descriptions here of luxury living, fine foods and beautiful scenery, as well as beautiful people. There is considerable lingering over a well-toned male torso wetly emerging variously from a pool or the sea. So chaps, if you want to know what women want you could do worse than read this, then get yourself a healthy bank balance and spend time in the gym. Oh, and also be a charming, sophisticated man of the world, and loyal and self-sacrificing, etc. Then the super-hot, charming, decent Bella Mason’s of this world can be yours.
One reference puzzled me was to a ‘Fairfax and Favor boot box’ [p114]. Perhaps Barnett’s target readership gets this, but it did seem rather an odd way to characterise a junior doctor’s tiny London flat.
This book delivers more than simple chick-lit pleasures though. The main characters are credible and well developed, their actions for the most part reasonable. No one is completely a black-hat or a white-hat, all have at least minor faults and some virtues. There are real human shades of grey here.
This sets out to be light summer reading and it delivers entertainingly on that promise. The writing is breezy and slips down easily. An occasional switch in point-of-view to some of the secondary characters fills in on plot points and motivation, and this is handled smoothly. There is some light humour, with a running gag, not overdone, about the captain’s name. The plotting is sharp and delivers what we need to keep turning the pages until we guiltily realise we have consumed this box of chocolates only too quickly (and one or two turned out to be surprisingly spicy).
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Summer-Riviera-gorgeously-heartwarming-friendship-ebook/dp/B0BTHMV6ML
More reviews: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138248608-a-summer-on-the-riviera?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=5L6t8iWiLc&rank=1
© William John Graham, June 2023