I’ve enjoyed reading Elly Griffiths’ crime books and discovered somewhere along the way that this was a pseudonym of Domenica De Rosa. De Rosa’s books looked rather girly and chick lit like and not really my kind of thing. When I spotted one in the library though I picked it up to have a look and ended up absorbed by it.

The ‘Summer School’ of the title is a fortnight long writing workshop taking place in a renovated castle in Tuscany. The characters seemed a bit stereotypical to start with but most of them broke enough boundaries that they seemed like real enough people. It is all a little predictable and I guessed where several of the storylines were going but that didn’t really matter. There were a few things that didn’t seem quite right, for example, a character who only seemed to be remembered once every 100 pages. I think there is something a bit odd about reading about a writers workshop - it made me want to rewrite parts of this book! That’s not something I usually think about!

On the whole though, a decent piece of light entertainment and I’ll quite possibly read more at some point in the future.