Plan B - Emily Barr

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 ... more

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 ... more

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 ... more