Review: From Notting Hill with Love Actually by Ali McNamara
From Notting Hill with Love…Actually by Ali McNamara. Sourcebooks Landmark (October 1, 2012) ISBN: 978-1402269486. Trade Paperback ($14.99 / Amazon $10.19) Kindle eBook ($10.94).
With a title that mentioned two of my favorite movies, I could hardly resist the chance to read this book.
Scarlett O’Brien loves movies which happens to work well with her job. She and her father own a company that makes and repairs popcorn machines mostly used by movie theaters. Her fiance, David, and his family own a string of movie theaters. You’d think it was a match made in heaven except that neither her father or David like movies all that much. They were constantly at Scarlett to grow up and pay attention to her life because movies were pure fantasy. After a particularly stressful dinner with some of David’s clients, Scarlett wasn’t sure what she wanted to do about her upcoming wedding and even about David and her fathers attitude toward her movie addiction, as they called it.
Scarlett daydreamed about movies when life got boring and living with David it often got boring. She’d pretend she was in a movie: acting out scenes that now starred her, getting an award for best actress, writing a great screenplay, or meeting one of her favorite actors. Even her best friend, Maddie, thought she spent far too much time at the movies or dreaming about them. Maddie did feel that Scarlett needed a break from David so she called a friend who needed a house-sitter and set it up for Scarlett to live at their house on Notting Hill for a month. Scarlett thought she’d use the month to see just how many movie moments she could have and prove to David, Maddie, and her father that life could be like a movie.
That’s the set up and it’s actually fun as Scarlett meets some interesting and quirky characters as she moves into the house at Notting Hill beginning with Oscar who came around a corner and spilled orange juice on her when neither one was paying attention to where they were going. Through Oscar she met a number of other shop owners and residents of the area. Her next door neighbor, Sean, first met in the travel bookstore from the movie and didn’t make a very good first impression.
The book is filled with movie references — old and new. Life becomes anything but boring while house sitting as her new friends band together to help her gather movie moments. When they find out that her mother left her and her father when she was very, very young and she wants to find her everyone kicks into high gear to help her out — including Sean.
From Notting Hill with Love Actually is pure fun. Scarlett is a professional woman with a romantic bent trying to do the right thing for everyone around her often to her own detriment. She’s no more a dreamer than many people but her life has so much more opportunity for boredom that personally, I can’t blame her to escaping to her daydreams — who hasn’t in the midst of a boring staff meeting. She does have a tendency, as most romantic comedy heroines do, to jump to conclusions before getting the facts and this drives a lot of the plot.
There’s no lesson here; however, it is interesting to note that just as in life trying to force an event to happen the way you want often blows up in your face while the spontaneous events that are inline with your desires and hopes often go unnoticed or unappreciated. If every reader thought about their daily life and the spontaneous events and acts that give them joy — maybe just maybe they’d find that life is often like a movie — hopefully a romance not a drama.
As always, I look forward to comments and impression from those who have also read the book.