Reading & Listening

The Amalfi Coast seems to be everywhere these days. George Clooney has a villa there where his Ocean's 11-13 pals can come chill and let's not forget that TomKat was supposed to get married there too. It was also featured in one of those Travel channel shows the other day and after watching twenty minutes of the show, I wanted to move there. Who wouldn't want to live there or get married there? It's an exceptionally beautiful part of the world


Perhaps that's why last night, when I spied the cover of Santa Montefiore's novel, Last Voyage of the Valentina, I immediately picked it up and flipped it over to read the back:

"Exotically beautiful but desperately unhappy, Alba lives on a houseboat on the Thames, where she enjoys a life of leisure and entertains an endless and unfulfilling succession of lovers."

Hmm...I started to wonder, why is Alba so unhappy? Is she an unfulfilled trust-fund baby? Why does she have such a hard time picking a decent guy? I could care less about that kind of stuff but I kept on reading.

"But then she discovers a portrait of her dead mother, Valentina -- a woman she'd hardly known, whose story has been kept from her by her still grieving father."

Ok. A dead mother. Sounds like a mystery to me. There might be some international intrigue here! How did her mother die? Why doesn't her father talk about her mother? Maybe her mom was a spy of some sort?

"Determined to learn the truth about Valentina, Alba returns to the olive groves of the Amalfi coast of Italy.

The images of that travel show in my mind, I plunked down $15 for the paperback. I'm going to make a leap of faith here and guess that I'm going to see Alba solve some kind of mystery, find happiness and fall in love with a smokin' hot Italian guy.

We shall see!