Carrie Goes Off the Map

October 3, 2011
Characters try to come to terms with heartache in Ashley’s engaging and very English contemporary romance. Carrie Brownhill is stunned when her fiancé dumps her and marries another woman a few months later. Carrie decides to join a friend on a European road trip, but things don’t go as planned, and she winds up driving a camper van through the English countryside with Dr. Matt Landor, who has his own secrets about an accident he was involved in. Their bickering slowly evolves into a simmering attraction, but Carrie is wary of risking her heart again so soon, especially since Matt is supposed to go overseas. The predictable, well-worn plot dead-ends in a rushed conclusion, but Ashley’s charming prose makes the journey enjoyable.

November 1, 2011
Carrie is devastated when her longtime fianc' and business partner dumps her two weeks before their wedding. Four months later, she's equally enraged to discover he'd been cheating on her all along. Concerned friends and family coax and coerce her into taking a monthlong caravan trip round Europe to gain a fresh outlook. When she does, her best friend and traveling companion, Regina, lands the job of her dreams. This leaves Carrie with sexy but enigmatic Dr. Matt Landor for company on a jaunt through Dover and Cornwall. The moods in Ashley's English contemporary second-chance romance veer back and forth between self-pity, bravado, and lust for much of the narrative, but her plucky characters keep picking themselves up and pushing on to their happy endings. The novel echoes themes of betrayal, withdrawal, and unrequited love established in Ashley's Dating Mr. December (2010) without exhibiting the sparkling humor and wit that made that story so charming. Yet this tale has its own, Bridget Jonesstyle appeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)