For The Love of Coffee
By Fiona Woodifield
Who can resist a book called For The Love of Coffee? Life, love, coffee all swirl round like a mug of your favourite coffee beans. Find out more in the blurb and my thoughts in my review below.
Blurb
Meet Romilly Greene, people-pleaser extraordinaire, loving and dutiful wife, mother, sister and daughter, always putting everyone else’s needs before her own. But the truth is she feels trapped and unfulfilled. When the cracks in her marriage begin to show, she and her daughters Elise and Summer run away from it all to the picturesque village of Melstock, the place of her idyllic childhood holidays.
They are soon welcomed into the heart of the community by a host of quirky characters, notably Mark Whittaker, the disturbingly attractive owner of the local country estate.
Trouble is brewing quite literally however as the future of Melstock’s historic coffee factory comes under threat, Summer’s teacher, the cute and brooding Henry Barton seems to have taken her in violent dislike, Elise is bullied at secondary school and there appears to be no escape from Romilly’s husband and his hideous mother.
Will Romilly ever manage to put herself first for once and rediscover her own identity, whilst juggling single parenting and attempting to recapture the lost tatters of her love life? Or will she settle for familiarity and security above all else?
Review
First of all, the first thing that hit me was the title – The Love of Coffee. With so many coffee lovers in the world, including myself, this is perfect! Momentarily, because he is so iconic, the tv show For the Love of Dogs by the late, great, Paul O’Grady, flickers in my brain and then straight back into the book, which turns out to be a rather interesting read, with more depth than imagined. There are some hard-hitting themes within the writing that also sports a lightness of touch.
Romily Greene is one of the world’s greatest people pleasers, always putting others ahead of herself, even though she doesn’t feel it is fulfilling her or meeting her own needs. Essentially everyone is getting more from her and at the same time, she is depleting herself. She’s a very relatable character and interesting to read. In what seems like book that could easily be something that we’ve all read before, this shows that there is a depth to the character. It draws you into her story and you want to see what is coming next, especially when she ups sticks and moves away with her daughters, Elise and Summer. It comes quite unexpectedly from someone who has been such the dutiful wife and yet she has such a sense of self as the realisation comes with it not being all that she wants out of life and wants to know what and who is out there for her. There’s suddenly a sense of, almost adventure and exploration, not in the traditional sense, but in the sense of seeing what life there is beyond. The eroding of part of her life, motherhood and the loss of her one time love as he moves on and all the stress and frustrations.
The coffee factory, sounds an exciting, enticing place and is re-enforced as being so, with references to Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but this book is for adult readers, so it isn’t a whimsical tour around where coffee is made in that sense. It is in trouble and could close-down, imminently.
New romance comes in the form of Mark Whittaker, smooth talking and rather dishy.
The decadence of coffee makes things better in this community. Life can be difficult and challenging to navigate at times, with bullying and gaslighting, but coffee swirls around this, easing something different in, with what else it can bring, except a delicious drink.
Kick back with a cup of your favourite coffee, smell the aroma and soak up the words on the pages.
About the Author
As a young child, Fiona spent hours reading, curling up with a book was one of her favourite past times. Her current volume would accompany her everywhere, to school, on daytrips, holidays and visits. The idea of providing an imaginary world in which others can escape is a wonderful one and this became Fiona’s dream, to become a published author.
From an early age, Fiona’s parents encouraged her writing – it all started when they gave her a simple red lined exercise book. Soon she had a collection of notebooks, small, large, plain, The Snowman, Brambly Hedge, they all became full of her jottings.
Years later, Fiona studied for a Combined Arts Degree at Durham, then a Masters in English – writing her thesis on Jane Austen and Masculinity. In total contrast she went to work for a renowned fashion magazine in London, then various marketing posts. Four lovely daughters later, during which time she has graduated from laughing at Mrs Bennet to sympathising with her, she continued to scribble away, only the notebooks are somewhat bigger. Fiona has written for national magazines on diverse subjects from Jane Austen to caravanning! One morning the idea came to her for ‘The Jane Austen Dating Agency’ and this was the first book she just had to write. The sequel, ‘A Wedding at the Jane Austen Dating Agency,’ was published in August.
Fiona is also the author of the lockdown romance, ‘Love in Lockdown,’ which was published in November 2020 by Avon Books, under the pseudonym Chloe James.
Fiona obviously loves writing, especially romantic comedy, meeting with friends and family, dancing, visiting historical houses (dreaming she lives there of course) walks by the sea and escaping into a book whilst consuming a worrying amount of chocolate.
Charity Norman was born in Uganda and brought up in successive draughty vicarages in Yorkshire and Birmingham. After several years’ travel she became a barrister, specialising in crime and family law. In 2002, realising that her three children had barely met her, she took a break from the law and moved with her family to New Zealand. THE SECRETS OF STRANGERS is her sixth novel.
Cath is scatty, messy and guarded. While Si is impossibly tidy, bitchy and desperate for a man of his own. They are total opposites – but equally unlucky in love. And they’ve stuck together through thick and thin. Because that’s what best friends do.
Bookmarks and Stages by Lou 