Sometimes a book falls into your hands and, without knowing anything about it, you suddenly find yourself reading it. When I finished one book, this was the next one I picked up from the pile. The author wrote for more than fifteen years for magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Self, and Glamour. I don't know who this would appeal to - not very good, not very interesting, with actually unappealing characters.
Three beautiful French sisters entrust an American hiker with the mission of rescuing their mother high in the Alps. But what if she doesn't want to be found?
Recently fired, with only a few days before starting a finance job in New York, Jim Olsen is hiking with a friend in the Swiss Alps. At a chalet, they meet three beautiful women (named after the Muses) who seductively implore him to tell their mother (the aristocratic Madame de Bonnin de la Bonniniere de Beaumont, rumoured to be higher up the mountain), to please return home. Since he is charmed and going that way, he agrees. Travelling alone, he becomes disoriented and leaves the trail, stumbling into a beautiful valley where the mother is living a beautifully rustic life in part of a sixth century Benedictine monastery. Why would she go home to a husband who holds her down? That her name is Calliope and she spends her time beekeeping and talking to owls like Diana the Huntress should tell you about the tone of the book. Discovered then by a helicopter search team out sent by her politician husband to retrieve her, they escape up the Wildhorn in search of the fabled cave of an old hermitess, where they hope to hide out.
It's not written well enough to recommend, it's too light to be much of anything. It's a story with an ending. I can't think who the market is for this book. Afterwards, I realized it left a bad taste. The girls were manipulative, then turned on him when it didn't turn out as they hoped. The mother was trapped in a life she didn't want. Jim carries on and gets the little carrot at the end, pulled out of the blue for a supposed happy ending (?).
I find it interesting that novels geared to women often have the female characters turn on each other, like no one gets to be happy. This was a non-event.
2016 / Tradeback / 246 pages
Comments