Plan B - Emily Barr

Emily Barr write travel-themed chick lit, usually with a bit of a twist. I have always enjoyed reading her books as I feel that they often have a bit more substance than some of the fluffy chick-lit on the market, and when I saw 'Plan B' in the library and realised I hadn't read it yet, I decided to check it out. Plan B is the story of Emma, Matt and their two year old daughter Alice. At the start of the book, they are moving away from their home in Brighton to start a new life in rural France - sounds perfect, doesn't it? However, all is not as idyllic as it seems. Matt has persuaded Emma to move abroad despite her reservations about leaving her settled home ...  Read the complete review

I have read most of Emily Barr's novels and each one is fresh and enjoyable and you think they can't get any better. However, having just read Plan B, they do get better and I was totally absorbed in this story from the moment I picked the book up! Emily Barr is such a good storyteller and she hooks you from the very start so that you don't want to stop reading. I found myself snatching odd moments in the day to pick this book up, and now that I've finished it I'm almost disappointed as I didn't want to stop reading. The main character in the book is Emma and over half of the story is told from her point of view and is written in the first person. At the ...  Read the complete review

In America, Plan B is the brand name for emergency contraception, and their tag line is “For when things don’t go as planned”. If ever there was a sentence to summarize this story, that would be it. I like Emily Barr’s books, although after a few you can start to predict some of the details because they all stick to the same vague formula. Each thus far has included a British girl with an relatively interesting past spending at least some of the book in a non-British setting, and this one is no exception. Emma is a young stay at home mother with a 2 year old daughter, Alice. She lives in Brighton with her partner Matt, but he travels a lot with his job so ...  Read the complete review

Travel journalist Emily Barr has more or less cornered the market, it seems, in travel-related chick-fic featuring realistically flawed characters in unfortunate situations. “Plan B” is her fifth novel, following the earlier “Backpack”, “Baggage”, “Cuban Heels” and “Atlantic Shift”, which involved locations as diverse as Australia, Cuba and the USA. “Plan B” takes place in the South of France, and since this is where Barr herself now lives, we can probably assume her take on the young-family-moving-to-France theme to be a fairly realistic one, at least so far as location is concerned. Even the heroine’s name – Emma – is similar to her own, although I do hope Emily has ...  Read the complete review