Several people on the Friends and Fiction page on Facebook have noted, “I love Maeve Binchy, who else can I read who writes like she does?” Most have answered “Rosamunde Pilcher,” but that’s a fairly limited list of books, and then what? Several others mentioned a writer I’d never heard of, also Irish, named Patricia Scanlan, so I decided to check her out (yes, that’s a pun).

The first book I had sent to my Kindle was Francesca’s Party, written in 2020. It’s a classic scenario without the expected resolution: Loving wife (and housewife) of 20 years discovers her husband is cheating on her with a younger “career woman” from his office and goes to pieces. But before we get the scenes of weeping in the bathtub and eating tubs of ice cream, Francesca follows hubby Mark and new squeeze Nikki to the airport, gets their destination, and figures out where they will be staying. She then goes home, packs up a couple of suitcases of his clothes, flies there herself, and knocks on their door to dump the bags at his feet and tell the mistress he’s her problem now. And then she goes home and changes the locks.

So far, so good. But then we get a long slow narrative of rage, bitterness, humiliation, and hibernation on the part of Francesca, interspersed with commentary from the cheating spouse and triumphant girlfriend, and this portion of the book shows how dated the story has become. Somehow Binchy’s books manage to keep their sense of timelessness (for the most part), but this one of Scanlan’s goes in a bit too much for the clichés, and lets you know it’s definitely a product of its time. Scanlan’s writing is also not up to the standard of Binchy or Pilcher; it’s not bad, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

Francesca’s Party is, nonetheless, a successful story with a refreshing resolution that one wouldn’t necessarily expect, given the subject matter and the timestamp, and I might try another sometime. I would call it true chick lit; but hey, sometimes that’s what you want, right?