Title: Tuscany for Beginners

Author: Imogen Edwards-Jones

Publisher: Ballantine Books 2005

Genre: Fiction

Pages: 313

Rating: 2/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Mount TBR; Read Your Book Shelf; New to Me

Belinda Smith has found her very ownTuscanvalley in the sun, having abandoned a dreary cheating husband and an even drearier English town. Running Casa Mia, her own too, too divine bed and breakfast, everything is coming up sunflowers and olive groves for La Contessaof the Valley. Life couldn’t be more perfecto!

Until, that is, the arrival of Lauren–a beautiful, feisty Wall Street ball-breaker who has the gall to announce her plans to open a new B&B. A place just like Belinda’s–only much more glamorous. Even worse, Lauren, whose charmingly calculated smile Belinda recognizes as quite like her own, threatens Belinda’s existence as the epicenter of all things ex-patriot in the valley.

A Under the Tuscan Sun knock-off that was a complete disappointment. I get that Belinda's supposed to be a deluded character in the beginning and then grow after Lauren's arrival, but I didn't care and never grew to like Belinda. I couldn't get over her ridiculous nonsense in the beginning of the book. And the way she treated her daughter? Do not get me started on the wrongness of it all. I just couldn't seem to care about Belinda. The writing wasn't the best and I kept getting distracted by the odd sentence structures. An utter disappointment.