Wild Designs: A Novel by the Author of Stately Pursuits Book

There were definitely times I wanted to smack the main character, Althea, upside the head. Also, her sister, her ex, her mother, and a few other characters.

Althea is a 38-year-old divorced mother-of-teens who's just lost her job as a school secretary. This is not all bad news--it gives Althea a chance to try for a career as a gardener, previously her hobby. Her younger sister is a bossy critic of pretty much anything Ally does or is--and their mother is apparently worse, but fortunately lives at a distance. However, the house with the greenhouse where she's been raising her plants--without permission--has just been sold, and now she's got to get permission to use it. The new owner is a good-looking architect with a possessive, rather tarty girlfriend-cum-secretary. THEN, as her swan-song with the school, Ally winds up chaperoning students on a trip to France, and gets stuck with sharing quarters with the handsome architect.

And that's just the first chapter or two. Ally runs hot and cold with her attraction to the architect. She worries about her kids. She fights with her sister. She does a fair bit of whining. (Annoying, but not so much as her hot-and-cold-running.) But it was still a good read. I enjoyed the Englishness of the story. The every-day-ness of the story was a large part of why it was interesting to me. I know people much like Althea. I am people like Althea, though while I do tend to let people take advantage of me, I don't simmer in quite such silence. Anyway, it was quite a nice story.