Falling for Provence by Alison Roberts

When Ellie, Laura, and Fiona Gilchrist inherit a house in Provence from an uncle they never knew, Laura organizes a trip to inspect it and brings Ellie along. Ellie is recovering from the tragedy of losing her infant son and her family wants her to try to move on. The little house has been empty for years but artistic Ellie is intrigued by terracotta tiles and the neglected garden; impulsively, she decides to stay behind to get the property into shape so it can be sold.

Laura returns to Scotland and Ellie tackles La Maisonette, including two donkeys that apparently belonged to her uncle, which brings her into contact with her closest neighbor, a doctor, Julien Rousseau, and his three-year-old son, Theo. At first, it is painful for Ellie to be near a child but after a rocky start, she and Julien hit it off. Because neither of them wants a permanent relationship, a summer romance that lasts just as long as it takes Ellie to fix up the house would be ideal, wouldn’t it?

My Impression: There’s a lot of delightful wish fulfillment in this book, and I am sure we would all Fall for Provence if an unknown uncle left us a house there (or known – although I think my uncle is more the Italian villa type). A handsome, sensitive Frenchman next door is just the icing on the cake! Maybe it is predictable that Ellie will recover from her tragedy in a picturesque location when swept off her feet by a new romance but (a) she deserves it; not only has she lost her child but her former boyfriend left her when she found out she was pregnant, and (b) it is a lot of fun for the reader to get descriptions of Provence and the nearly-perfect romance as well. However, there are complications: Ellie soon realizes she has fallen in love but Julien’s marriage was a failure and he is determined not to disrupt his son’s life again. This won’t be easy.

I enjoyed all the descriptions of fixing up the house, although couldn’t help thinking the process was way too easy for Ellie – she was never worried about how much she was spending on the rehab (Laura had agreed to front the expenses out of their eventual profit but still), the workmen were friendly and reliable, there were no disasters where walls crumbled or plumbing failed, and she never DIY injured herself. Hey, I wish she’d take over the maintenance of my home! There is a particularly poignant scene where she has steeled herself to tackle the bedroom that once belonged to a child.  She examines the room:

The plain, bare white walls that looked like an oversized canvas . . . . If she were a child on her first visit to France and had gone running up those stairs to find where she was going to sleep, what would make this space as magical as everything else about her holiday?

By the time she had wiped down every square inch of that cot, Ellie knew what she was going to do. She’d paint a frieze on the walls just above the level of the bed frame and the sides of the cot. Tendrils of green ivy and scattered blooms of daisies and poppies and spears of lavender.

This is significant because it shows Ellie can move past her overwhelming grief to rediscover her passion for art, and I liked that this gives her a purpose beyond waiting for the man next door. However, this book provides an emotional second chance at love for two deserving characters as well as some appealing armchair travel.

Author: Alison Roberts, a native New Zealander, is the author of more than one hundred novels and is now living and writing in a village in the South of France – doubtless why the setting of Falling for Provence is so convincing!  I took a Viking River cruise in Provence with my mother three years ago and this book took me right back there.

Publication and Purchase Link: Boldwood Books, 2024

Genre: Contemporary Romance
Setting: France
Source: Thanks to the publisher, NetGalley, and Rachel's Random Resources for the review copy.

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Spoiler:

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Ellie is entranced by a painting of Provence by a mysterious local artist. I was sure he would turn out to be the father who abandoned her family when she was a child, but that didn’t happen. If there are more books about the other Gilchrist sisters, we shall see . . .