When Two Books Give You Lemons - Which One Should You Read?

These fabulous books came out this summer, written by two of my favourite authors:   Rosanna Ley and Jo Thomas. The covers look so similar - a table on an Italian terrace overlooking the blue sea, surrounded by lemons, and both are recommended by well known romantic novelists, but would these stories be as good as they look? Which one should you read?

Vernazza with boats 'parked' in the street!

I decided to read The Lemon Tree Hotel first and find out. This is a family story of three generations running The Lemon Tree Hotel in Vernazza, in the Cinque Terre, which I visited a few years ago.
It focuses on Chiara, who is fifty-nine and who inherited the hotel from her parents who opened it to save the buildings of an old convent which had been left in a state of disrepair; her daughter, Elene, who is in charge of the kitchen, and her daughter, Isabella, who has been to business school and helps her grandma with running the rest of the hotel.
There is also Aunt Giovanna who's in her eighties. She's not really an aunt, but was saved by Chiara's parents when the convent closed and now lives in a cottage in the grounds.
Life is going smoothly (although there is a widening rift between Chiara and Elene about how to run the hotel!) until the day that two new guests, Dante and Ferdinand, arrive separately and shake up everyone's lives.

Wikipedia 

Then, I settled down with My Lemon Grove Summer. At college, Zelda and Lennie made a pact that if they hadn't found anyone else by the time they were forty, they would marry each other. So here they are, part of a group of people promised a new start in Sicily with subsidised rents and a relocation fee, arriving in Città d'Ora to find the town is all run down because no tourists ever stop there on their way to Mount Etna. And their homes aren't ready to move into either!

Giuseppe, the mayor, who has invited them to Sicily, lets them stay in his family's farmhouse surrounded by lemon groves for the time being,  but the group is not made welcome in the town.

So on one side, there is Zelda and Lennie; Tabitha, a wannabe journalist; Barry, an ex-postman, Ralph, an ex-city banker and Sherise and Billy, ex-dairy farmers, and on the other: Romeo, who has the town under his control, and his brother, Matteo, the builder. 

Although, Giuseppe, their cousin, is trying to make things work, what the town needs is something to pull it together, and will Romeo's son, Luca, the gorgeous restauranteur, be the one to help the hapless Brits? 

And what about the wedding that tradition in the town says is needed to appease the rumbling Mount Etna? Are Zelda and Lennie ready for it?

These are wonderful stories of romance, sunshine and lemons in Italy. The cast of characters in both are perfect, and each book really explores life in its own region and, the loves and relationships of the people who live there.  

So if books give you lemons, I say read and enjoy both of them! Perhaps with a glass of limoncello?

The Villa by Rosanna Ley - Read it for Sheer Pleasure!

I know that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but the covers of Rosanna Ley's books entice me to pick them up, and I can't resist!
I bought Bay of Secrets last summer because of its beautiful cover, but I didn't get round to reading it. However, when Rosanna was featured in Writing Magazine (June 2015), I decided to read all her four novels, starting with The Villa (her first), and I wasn't disappointed!
The article talked about her skills at 'writing multi-stranded epic romance' where 'place and story are inescapably intertwined', and this is just what she's done in The Villa.
It tells the story of Tess, who inherits a villa in Sicily from an mysterious benefactor; her problematic daughter, Ginny, who flunks her A Level exams on purpose so she doesn't have to go to university; and Tess's mother, Flavia, who left Sicily at the age of seventeen, never to return.
Sicily takes centre stage when Tess visits the island for the first time to find out why she's been left the Villa Sirena. Family feuds and tales of murder and deceit concerning the mystery of Il Tesoro, the treasure that the villa is supposed to hide, bring her into contact with Giovanni Sciarra who is very interested in her, but is it for the right reasons? Then there is also the mosaic artist, Tonino Amato, dark and moody, yet he's bothered about her diving alone in the sea. . .
Tess leaves Ginny with her parents, and things seem to be going well until Ginny's father, David, turns up after leaving Tess when she became pregnant all those years ago to go to Australia. (I love Ginny and her alliterative exclamations: 'meandering meerkats' to give just one!)
Running alongside Tess's story, is Flavia's own which she writes down in a notebook, interspersed with recipes, as she's never been able to tell Tess, or even her own husband, Lenny, the whole truth about why she left her Sicilian home and family, after the war, to live at first in smoggy, cold November London.
Throughout the book, the colours and moods of the Sicilian landscape reflect the action in the story and I think it would be a perfect novel to take on holiday, or read for sheer pleasure!