Starting Over (Charnwood Library) [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Aptly titled, the story is all about beginning again. Now living on her family's farm in a small Scottish town, 38-year-old Liz Dewhurst is reeling from the disintegration of her marriage. But not to worry, a broken heart may be mended when Liz takes in a boarder - a handsome older man, Arthur Kempler, a professor at her son's school.

True to the Pilcher program (which the author's mother novelist Rosamunde Pilcher mines so successfully) complications develop. The farm is on the verge of bankruptcy; developers want to turn it into a posh golf course. This is a fate that Liz's father, a fifth generation farmer, cannot countenance. The betraying Gregor, Liz's ex husband, with his filly of the moment in tow shows up to lobby for the golf course as he owns adjoining property.

What conundrums - if Liz turns down the tempting financial offer town folk will be unhappy as they perceive the golf course to be an asset. However, if she accepts it, she will be helping Gregor and his new lady friend.

When Arthur invites Liz to join him on holiday in Spain, she accepts. There is much more than the Prado in Spain as the pair soon discover when they meet someone that neither of them expected to see.

Surprises spiced with romance make "Starting Over" entertaining listening.

- Gail Cooke

But I also wondered if this book would be getting the attention it has if he did not carry the famous name.

For the record, then: I think I, and many other reviewers and readers, have established rather firmly that the son is not the mother. Although "Starting Over" weaves a tale of many different types of people with all sorts of secrets and private heartbreaks, there the comparison ends. This is a slow-moving, not very believable story about two farms, joined by marriage, that fall privy to a monied consortium that wants to turn the land into a prize golf course to rival St. Andrews and the other famous links on Fife's East Coast. This set of events strongly affects Elizabeth, who is only 37, but who acts and speaks as if she were 20 years older (I actually had to turn back to the first pages to confirm her age); her 20-year-old college student son Alex; her recently bereaved father; and her estranged, cheating husband Gregor.

Gregor, who speaks in hip, up-to-date language on one page, and lapses into a wee bit of Scottish dialect on the next, also seems older than his 38 years. He has taken up with a bimbo, thus losing his loyal wife and loving son. The bimbo has moved into Gregor's farmhouse (yeah, right), and cooks dinner in her tight pink pants while he helps the sheep give birth out in the barn.

Elizabeth (Liz) and Alex have decamped from their bimboed family home and taken up residence with her father, who IS old, but who manages to scramble up and down hills, do the work of 12 men himself, and lug extremely heavy golf bags for 18 holes without breaking a sweat. I kept expecting him to have a heart attack!

Then there is Roberta, an Australian 60-ish spinster who arrives in the vicinity after the death of her beloved father, to whom she had a childlike and chilish attachment, precluding any serious relationship for herself. It is her clubs that Liz's dad (called Mr. Craig through most of the book) is hefting about the golf courses, acting as her erstwhile caddy, because he senses sorrow in her demeanor, and thinks he can help.

Rounding out this motley crew is a highly eccentric professor of German from Alex's college, who needs lodgings and winds up at the farmhouse. He is given to spouting German that is never translated or explained. In the same way, another character (I won't be a spoiler and reveal in this review who he is) is fluent in Spanish, which comes in handy during a trip to Spain, but which is not translated either (I know Spanish, even to the point of recognizing the misspelled word, but it must be terribly annoying to those who do not, because there is quite a lot of it in the middle of the book).

OK, I have to say it: If these characters were gathered together in a book by Rosamunde, it all would have made sense, we would have come away with a new depth of understanding and a heartwarming sense of a story well-told. That is not the case here. The characters never really quite meld, the story is quite awkward in places, and in the end, nothing at all makes any sense.

I love Scotland, and I generally like books with ensembles rather than one or two characters, but I will not make the mistake again of expecting more than Robin Pilcher can give. He is a pleasantly average writer, and that is not a bad thing. And certainly, with this second book, he deserves to be reviewed on his own merits. I hope I have done so, but I have to admit that I did not see this book as having star quality.