Going Dutch – Katie Fforde

When you get married you expect to share your life with the person you have fallen in love with. But for Jo and Dora, sharing seems to be rather challenging.

Jo’s husband decided that he would share himself with another younger woman, and Jo leaves him to start her own life again and finds herself living on a barge in London owned by a friend.

Dora makes the momentous decision that who she has chosen to share her life with, is not going to make her happy and so she escapes and seeks refuge on the barge with Jo who also happens to be her best friends mum.

A new form of sharing begins as Jo and Dora try and find their feet in the new challenges that face them. Dora forms a friendship with Tom, who works at the local boat yard and he wants to share the more daring and unsafe side of life and challenges Dora to push herself out into the world.

Life on the barge seems idyllic, Jo is finding a new way to make a living when she finds out the barge needs to be re-insured, inspected and this cannot be done where they are – it needs to go to Holland. Jo needs to face up to actually travelling in this barge and sharing the adventure with the man who has been brought in to complete the task, Marcus. A friend from Jo’s past.

Dora sees this as another opportunity to break away from her safe past, and with the help of boat mad Tom, Ed an expert first mate, Jo and the brooding Marcus with his high maintenance girlfriend embark on the trip. A trip that will change them all. When they come back from their adventures will they be sharing ever again?

A lovely escapism book perfect for reading by the river, with a glass of wine in hand.  I would not say that this is one of my favourite Fforde novels I have read so far, but it is was pleasant and light hearted and for a while I was not sure where the plotline was going to go so I just had to keep reading but without as much as vigour with the other books I have read.

I cannot say I was disappointed with this book, as I did enjoy it but I was not as caught up in the tale as I had with the previous two novels I have read. However, being new to Katie Fforde and knowing that there are plenty more out there to read, I am not worried in the slightest and now coveting which one of her novels to read next!