A Size Too Small

Living in Paris, recently broken up from her boyfriend, Emily Eden is spinning her wheels. She doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, so she heads to a remote island in Greece to figure it out.

There, she meets a handsome and equally wayward man, Liam, and his mother, Jo. She helps to run Jo’s bed and breakfast, Villa Juliette. Then, Emily’s mother, Delilah, shows up, needing to escape life in the same way Emily does. Emily and her mother are not on friendly terms but appear to grow closer as the book continues.

The premise of this book sounded like a good idea, but the experience reading it was drab. The heroine lives a profoundly charmed life and is challenged in no way by taking her life’s savings and running off to a Greek island for a six-month vacation. The book lacks a heaping spoonful of conflict in any flavor. Emily spends half of the book just flopping around the island and having will-they-or-won’t-they interactions with Liam, our dashing hero. In one scene, Emily is apprehensive about her mother being on the island, then after one conversation with her, Emily’s fine. There’s no rawness or emotion in their relationship and no catharsis for Emily or her mother. At the start of the book, Emily breaks up with her boyfriend of eight years. Rather than it being a conversation fraught with emotion, the breakup is told through the narrative in hindsight, and the boyfriend just gives her a hug and goes on his way.

In addition, the writing is a little flat. Emily just kind of wanders around and meets people on the island, and the dialogue reads like a job interview. There’s nothing personal or warm about any of the characters. It is as though they are being held at arm’s length from the reader.

This book has some good ideas, but the writing lacks intensity and intimacy with its audience.