‘The Benefits of Passion’ by Catherine Fox

One from the files to keep you going until I have time to report on the holiday reading.  🙂

I started out by loving this book. It tells the story of a thirty-something woman, single and training to be a priest, who suddenly starts to hear her body-clock ticking and to take her mind off it, writes an erotic novel.

The style was both original and fun. The flitting back and forth between real-life Annie and her own heroine Isabella was handled well. Unusually with ‘flashback’ style writing I was never once confused as to whose head or time frame I was in. The characters themselves, whether fictional or fictional-within-fictional, were engaging and there was some nice, sharp observational humour, of the type that has you looking for the candid camera the writer’s hidden in your home. LOL

Sadly, I felt very let down by the ending. Both Annie and Isabella found the answer to all their problems in marriage to Mr Right and childbirth, and left all other ambitions and desires at the church gate. Ugh. I have nothing against marriage or children, but these days surely women (fictional or otherwise) deserve something more in their lives? It all seemed a little too ‘pat’, like reading a novel and finding it was actually a sermon from the Church in disguise. I wasn’t entirely surprised to find that Catherine Fox is herself married to a vicar. But what works in her life isn’t necessarily very relevant to the majority of women today.

It was enough of a disappointment that I probably won’t be seeking out other titles from this author.