Portobello Book Blog

This book arrived in the post unexpectedly last week, as books occasionally do if you are a blogger. Usually I would add it to my to-be-read-sometime pile but I really fancied the look of this one so decided to read it as soon as I had finished my current read. I thought it looked like it would be great fun and I was right!

Lorrie was a character I immediately liked. She is a 40-something single mother, with two great kids, working hard in a job she loves at a cosmetics counter in a department store and has just decided that romance is not for her after a few bad (though funny!) experiences with internet dating. She doesn’t have much confidence in her appearance, not helped by her svelte 70 year old mother continually putting her down and one of her dates saying she looked like a woman ‘who likes her cakes’! But when she is contacted by Antoine, her first love and the boy who broke her heart when she was a teenager on a French exchange, she is very tempted to find out if there is any spark still there.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Lorrie as she wonders if she will ever find love again. She came across as a very real person coping, as many women do, with combining a home life with her work. It was really entertaining reading about her horror dates from the internet dating site, as she wonders if there are any normal men out there any more – and whether it’s worth the bother of looking! I was outraged on her behalf when changes at work threatened both her job and her happiness. I think lots of women will identify with Lorrie as she has the opportunity to meet up again with ‘the one that got away’ and will be eagerly following her reunion with Antoine, now a gorgeous businessman, to see if it will work out for them.

Fiona Gibson has written about her characters and events in a way that made them totally believable. I particularly liked Lorrie’s friend and lodger Stu, and thought his business idea was brilliant. He has a company called Parsley Force which delivers forgotten essential cooking ingredients to people who I think must have more money than sense. Ms Gibson, I hope you have trademarked that name! The elderly French sisters who own the cosmetics company Lorrie works for only made a brief appearance in the book but were such wonderful characters, full of life and ideas despite their age.

The Woman Who Met Her Match is a very enjoyable book, full of warm humour and characters you can relate to. It is the first of Fiona Gibson’s books I have read but I know I can now add her to my list of authors to turn to for funny and feel-good reads. I’ve no idea if any kind of sequel is planned but I would love to read more about Lorrie and her family. 

Thanks to the publishers Avon Books for sending me a copy of this book. It is published today as an e-book with the paperback following next week on 20th April. It will be available at all good bookshops or you can order a copy online here: The Woman Who Met Her Match

From the back of the book

What if your first love came back on the scene . . . 30 years later?

After yet another disaster, Lorrie is calling time on online dating. She might be single in her forties, but she’s got a good job, wonderful children and she’s happy. This, Lorrie decides, is going to have to be enough.

That is, until she receives a very unexpected request from France. Antoine Rousseau, who had once turned a lonely French exchange trip into a summer of romance, wants to see her – after thirty years.

But Lorrie is a responsible woman. She can’t exactly run off to Nice with the man who broke her teenage heart . . . can she?

A wonderfully funny novel, perfect for fans of Jill Mansell, Joanna Bolouri and Milly Johnson.