Going Home

GOING HOME: Harriet Evans: Downtown Books: Fiction: 437 pages

Twenty-something Lizzie grew up in Keeper House, her family’s ancestral English home, but after her uncle arrives for the Christmas holiday with a suspicious, American wife, the house is suddenly being sold with little explanation. Lizzie, who’s contemplating a move to L.A. and nursing a broken heart from a breakup with her boyfriend, begins scheming to save the house, all the while juggling relationships and helping plan her aunt’s wedding to an unconventional Australian carpenter.

This is a good choice for readers who enjoy Sophie Kinsella and Katie Fforde. Lizzie’s family crises, job crises, and relationship crises move the plot along in typical chick lit fashion, resolving satisfactorily right at the last moment, although readers will realize the truth about Lizzie’s ex-boyfriend long before the book’s characters do, which I found frustrating and considered something of a character flaw in Lizzie.

MBC