If you’re going to live the good life, I could think of worse places than in France.
Good Life – the blurb
One gray dismal day, Janine Marsh was on a trip to northern France to pick up some cheap wine. She returned to England a few hours later having put in an offer on a rundown old barn in the rural Seven Valleys area of Pas de Calais. This was not something she’d expected or planned for.
Janine eventually gave up her job in London to move with her husband to live the good life in France. Or so she hoped. While getting to grips with the locals and la vie Française, and renovating her dilapidated new house, a building lacking the comforts of mains drainage, heating or proper rooms, and with little money and less of a clue, she started to realize there was lot more to her new home than she could ever have imagined.
You can’t call a pig Napoleon
Fresh from reading The Impulse Purchase about a fictional woman who buys a pub on a whim I dived into Janine Marsh’s real life account of how she randomly purchased a dilapidated barn in France. I have to say it sounded terrible and have no idea what possessed her to complete the purchase. Janine clearly had vision however (and faith and naivety) as she now has a hot tub, home gym and boxing room to go alongside the menagerie of animals she found (she has a blog, which is kind of how the book came about actually and you can spy further on her here.)
As always I loved reading about French food and the idiosyncrasies of rural France. There is a cast of lovely supporting characters (neighbours) and a farm yard load of adopted waifs and strays all brilliantly named (Winston AND Churchill!) My Good Life was a joy to read and will certainly have you looking twice when passing ruined old barns on holiday.
