- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Penguin (27 Aug 2009)
- Language Unknown
- ISBN-10: 0141031247
- ISBN-13: 978-0141031248
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 141,795 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
French Kissing
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Name: Sally Marshall
Status: single mother
Age: 32
Nationality: ten years in France, yet still English through and through
I like: Living in Paris, playing with my daughter Lila (four years old), the company of good friends, the smell of baking bread...
So reads Sally's ad, posted on a French online dating site called Rendez-Vous. Sally left Nicolas, her French boyfriend of ten years and Lila's father, after she discovered that he was having an affair with his secretary. Six months have now passed, and although most of the time she feels as if she's just dashing around like a headless chicken, she's beginning to bounce back. But making a new start is fraught with complications. As she meets freshly single Frédéric for a drink, spends the night with charmer Manu and runs away from ex-pat Marcus, she wonders: can she find a way to reconcile motherhood with single womanhood? To what extent can she keep Lila and her love life separate? And is she truly ready to turn her back on Nicolas?
About the Author
Catherine Sanderson is a thirty-six-year-old Brit who was bitten by the French bug while still at school and has never looked back. Her first book, Petite Anglaise, a memoir, was published to fantastic acclaim in 2008. Her website of the same name is one of the best-loved British personal blogs. She lives in Belleville, Paris, with her daughter.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Oh Catherine, Catherine, Catherine. Where did it all go wrong? I loved your blog - LOVED it - and read it faithfully from the time I discovered it on Expatica (i.e. before you were famous) until its sad demise at the end of September. Your posts were often (and I don't use this word lightly) EXQUISITE, my favourite of all time being the piece about your daughter throwing up a heart-shaped Cornflake during a taxi ride to the airport on Valentine's Day. It was a moment perfectly captured, full of character and mordant wit. The same scene, recycled into 'fiction' here, but without the Valentine's connection or the heart-shaped cereal, has no zest or bite: it adds nothing to your text and typifies the lacklustre tone of every single page.
Oh, and to quote your last blog post: 'every scene and every last shred of dialogue' is invented in this book? Please. The scene I just described was real, just as pretty much everything and everyone else you describe is real: 'Sally' is clearly you; 'Lila' is clearly your real daughter; 'Anna' is clearly your best mate Meg; 'Rendez-Vous' is clearly Meetic, and nearly all of the dates you recount have mirroring pieces with REAL MEN IN THEM on your blog. Even Sally's thoughts on details like the guy whose Rendez-Vous/Meetic pic has half his ex-girlfriend's cheek on it, or your comments about 'caterpillar' facial hair on other men's pics are plucked right from your blog.
I'm so sorry this book isn't better and I can't write the glowing review I'm sure you'd prefer to read, but your words just irk me too much: how can you have the arrogance to say Sally/you (in another recycled blog quote) is so good at French that she's often mistaken for a native speaker, and then put an erroneous circumflex accent on 'sâli' (no; it's 'sali') just as you did on 'compôte' in 'Petite Anglaise' (NO, it's 'compote'; and while I'm at it, p. 61: should be 't'inquiète pas' with no S too...)
In case anybody is about to jump in and tell me this book is evidence of Cath's fabulous writing talent, here are a few examples of the contrary: does this sound like a natural dialogue between a mother and a father?: 'Her dreams are usually populated with princesses and unicorns, judging by what she tells me when she wakes up in the morning'. Of course not. Real people would say 'Her dreams are full of princesses and unicorns. That's what she tells me when she wakes up in the morning'. Sigh. And here's an excellent sentence construction for you: 'at the end OF one OF our OF late rather stilted fortnightly phonecalls...' Somebody get the poor girl an editor!!!
Catherine. Call me a troll, as I'm sure you will on your Facebook, but I love books too much to give this one any credit. Short pieces work well for you; rehashing your life in 'novel' form does not. So 'adieu' and not 'au revoir'; I'm afraid I won't be reading you again...
Oh, and to quote your last blog post: 'every scene and every last shred of dialogue' is invented in this book? Please. The scene I just described was real, just as pretty much everything and everyone else you describe is real: 'Sally' is clearly you; 'Lila' is clearly your real daughter; 'Anna' is clearly your best mate Meg; 'Rendez-Vous' is clearly Meetic, and nearly all of the dates you recount have mirroring pieces with REAL MEN IN THEM on your blog. Even Sally's thoughts on details like the guy whose Rendez-Vous/Meetic pic has half his ex-girlfriend's cheek on it, or your comments about 'caterpillar' facial hair on other men's pics are plucked right from your blog.
I'm so sorry this book isn't better and I can't write the glowing review I'm sure you'd prefer to read, but your words just irk me too much: how can you have the arrogance to say Sally/you (in another recycled blog quote) is so good at French that she's often mistaken for a native speaker, and then put an erroneous circumflex accent on 'sâli' (no; it's 'sali') just as you did on 'compôte' in 'Petite Anglaise' (NO, it's 'compote'; and while I'm at it, p. 61: should be 't'inquiète pas' with no S too...)
In case anybody is about to jump in and tell me this book is evidence of Cath's fabulous writing talent, here are a few examples of the contrary: does this sound like a natural dialogue between a mother and a father?: 'Her dreams are usually populated with princesses and unicorns, judging by what she tells me when she wakes up in the morning'. Of course not. Real people would say 'Her dreams are full of princesses and unicorns. That's what she tells me when she wakes up in the morning'. Sigh. And here's an excellent sentence construction for you: 'at the end OF one OF our OF late rather stilted fortnightly phonecalls...' Somebody get the poor girl an editor!!!
Catherine. Call me a troll, as I'm sure you will on your Facebook, but I love books too much to give this one any credit. Short pieces work well for you; rehashing your life in 'novel' form does not. So 'adieu' and not 'au revoir'; I'm afraid I won't be reading you again...
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The difference between Catherine Sanderson and Dan Brown is, Catherine knows her Paris. The narrative will hold no surprises to anyone who is familiar with Petite Anglaise through her blog, and doesn't veer very far from her own story of how she came to be the harrassed single mum of an adorable Anglo-French toddler in Paris. One is reminded of Diane Johnson's Le Divorce, which became a successful movie. The men she meets through the Rendez-Vous online dating site - are simply the bedroom wallpaper to Catherine's real love affair with the city of Paris. Anyone who has lived in this vibrant, maddening city, or just wanted to live there, will picture the pavement cafés, smell the crowded metro, visualize the caffeine-pumped Parisians charging about their daily life as Catherine paints her canvas like one of the artists on the Butte de Montmartre. It'll make you think twice about computer dating, though.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who picked up on the fact that French Kissing is far from being fictional, as has been pointed out by Lorna. As I was reading I couldn't believe the extent to which Catherine has recycled elements of her own life, most of which have appeared on her blog, passed it off as fiction, and then had the cheek to claim it is all invented.
I wouldn't really have a problem with this if she had managed to turn her experiences into a half decent read, but no... the "plot" is wafer thin, the writing is clunking and made me cringe time and time again. Sally is an extraordinarily unsympathetic heroine, and neither she nor any of the other main characters have any depth or substance... I was hoping for a twist, as the resume on the back of the book hints at a possible reunion with the father of her child, but none was forthcoming... or thought there might be an explanation as to why Nicolas cheated on Sally in the first place, but no, Catherine clearly couldn't be bothered to develop any of this any further.
Also - with regards to the Ecstasy episode - Catherine actually blogged about going to a rave and taking Ecstasy with her husband to be - this post was removed soon after she posted it, presumably due to the reaction it provoked, but this was actually just another example of her attempting to justify her shoddy behaviour (which is, after all, her forte) in a supposedly fictional context.
I would be very surprised if another book was forthcoming from Catherine Sanderson - unless it's another memoir, as she is clearly not able to write about any other topic than herself.
I wouldn't really have a problem with this if she had managed to turn her experiences into a half decent read, but no... the "plot" is wafer thin, the writing is clunking and made me cringe time and time again. Sally is an extraordinarily unsympathetic heroine, and neither she nor any of the other main characters have any depth or substance... I was hoping for a twist, as the resume on the back of the book hints at a possible reunion with the father of her child, but none was forthcoming... or thought there might be an explanation as to why Nicolas cheated on Sally in the first place, but no, Catherine clearly couldn't be bothered to develop any of this any further.
Also - with regards to the Ecstasy episode - Catherine actually blogged about going to a rave and taking Ecstasy with her husband to be - this post was removed soon after she posted it, presumably due to the reaction it provoked, but this was actually just another example of her attempting to justify her shoddy behaviour (which is, after all, her forte) in a supposedly fictional context.
I would be very surprised if another book was forthcoming from Catherine Sanderson - unless it's another memoir, as she is clearly not able to write about any other topic than herself.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Internet dating at your peril ...
Some of the reviews are comparing the author's blogs with the book. Well I am sure I can speak for some of us who do not read blogs and are quite happy to take the book on face... Read more
Published 1 month ago by H de Fanque
Easy and enjoyable read
I don't know why people insist on being so critical. If you read Petite's blog, which no doubt a large proportion of readers of this book have, then you will probably enjoy this... Read more
Published on 24 Nov 2009 by Alice Griffin
Delightful read
The French Kissing cover looks like `chic lit' but I thought it was more intelligently written than the average offering. Read more
Published on 4 Nov 2009 by Jo B
Fabulous!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was very easy to read. The plot is fairly straight-forward and there were no real surprises at the end. Read more
Published on 30 Sep 2009 by Estelle Calfe
French Kissing
Sally Marshall is single for the first time in 10 years as she's just split up with her partner Nico. Read more
Published on 25 Sep 2009 by Leah Graham
Superb second book - French Kissing
This is the first time I have left a review as I really thought this book warrented one. I read Catherine Sanderson's first book and loved it, I ordered French Kissing wondering... Read more
Published on 22 Sep 2009 by Mrs. P. Phillips
Fun, true to life - couldn't put it down!
Catherine Sanderson's writing is honest, real and enjoyable. She writes about topics that many people experience in their lives and that's what makes it so easy to relate to. Read more
Published on 22 Sep 2009 by Carrie
Delightful and refreshing, I was sorry when it was over!
As an ex-pat in Paris myself, who also happened to meet my French husband via a French dating website, I found Sanderson's latest book and first foray into fiction to be even more... Read more
Published on 22 Sep 2009 by Lisa Taylor Huff
Brilliant !
I will leave the plotline description , but this book is an excellent cannot put down read . I visit France often , and the authors descriptions of surroundings are spot on . Read more
Published on 21 Sep 2009 by caravancat
Readable BUT boring plot, some pretty terrible writing and a couple of...
I have followed Catherine's blog for several years - the blog is well written and her style of writing suits that medium. Read more
Published on 11 Sep 2009 by Amy
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
