The Perfect Match

by Katie Fforde

[Leah]

Katie Fforde is an author whose books I always buy, and always look forward to. She’s the author of a staggering amount of novels, and I was super surprised to find that The Perfect Match is her twentieth novel! That is immense, and not a lot of authors can say they’ve passed what is a massive benchmark. Of her twenty novels I must have read at least a quarter of them, if not more, and I like that I ALWAYS know how a Katie Fforde book will go, I always know I will get a very happy ending. Sure, perhaps her writing is a bit more proper and, perhaps, old-fashioned than the newer Chick Lit authors on the scene, but that gives her books character, and you always know when you’re reading a Katie Fforde novel.

A Perfect Match tells the tale of two people, Bella and Alice. Bella is Alice’s god-daughter and after falling in love with a married man, has moved in with Alice for a fresh start and a new job in an estate agents, and has also found herself a new boyfriend in Nevil. So Bella’s in for quite the shock when her friend, and client, Jane’s nephew, who’s visiting and staying with Jane, turns out to be none other than the man Bella fell in love with – Dominic Thane. She’s sure she’s over him, but she can’t help thinking about him, and wondering why he’s suddenly popped back into her life again. Alice on the other hand is in her sixties, and the last thing she expects when she boards the train home from a day away, and ends up paying for a sandwich and drink of a man who’s forgotten his wallet, is to fall in love. At her age, it’s the last thing on her mind, but Michael is persistent and soon Alice is wondering if, indeed, you can fall in love at any age….

A Perfect Match is yet another wonderful little novel from Katie Fforde! There’s a note at the beginning of the e-book where Katie talks a little about the research she does for each job she gives her characters, and in this case, she made Bella an estate agent, but not your usual estate agent. I always got the feeling that Bella actually cared about matching the right home with the right owners and that made me feel all happy inside. She wasn’t all about the sell, and I absolutely adored the fact that she told Jane to not sell her house, under any circumstances, unless that was actually what she wanted to do. That she saw Jane as a friend, and was happy to go and water her plants and sit and just have a piece of cake. The care and patience she showed to the fussy Agnews. So unlike what you normally read of estate agents, and it rather endeared me to Bella, although there were instances where I wanted to shake her. Especially regarding her relationship with the hateful Nevil. Nevil was awful, and no woman should put up with being told she needs to lose weight, or told they’re going to get married, rather than asking. He was just awful, and the second he told Bella to lose weight, I wanted her to tell him to get lost!

Alice’s story was so lovely, I do enjoy reading about older people falling in love, and I do believe you can fall in love at any age, I would have happily moved into the house she and Bella shared, it sounded right up my street! I quite enjoyed The Perfect Match. I will be honest, it rather lacked the romance of Fforde’s earlier novels – I still remember in one novel, where the hero kidnapped the heroine, which sounds waaaaay more stalker-ish than it should, but it reads as very romantic, because they both loved each other, obviously. I was never utterly convinced about Dominic and Bella, because they didn’t really talk or interact as much as I would have liked. I want sweeping declarations! But, I enjoyed the read and the pages rather flew by for me! I really liked Bella and Alice, they were two lovely, warm, enjoyable heroines to read about, and I just wish Bella had better self-esteem issues, because she should have kicked the awful Nevil to the curb way quicker than she did, because she deserved SO much better than him and his patronising ways. This was a wonderful read, and I loved that Katie Fforde keeps me hooked, book after book, after book and The Perfect Match is one of her warmest.