Costa del Churros

This book tells the story of British people behaving badly in Spain.

• Belinda is on the run with her husband Jez.  They are living on the yacht that is all they have left after their business collapsed in England, probably because of her husband’s shady dealings.
• Julia lives with her husband and daughter.  She’s the type of ex-pat who refers to all other foreigners as immigrants and is angry that people in Spain want her to speak something other than English.
• Laura lives in a super wealthy English enclave with her husband and mother and children.  She spends her time lunching with other wives and is bored out of her mind.
• Georgina has been dumped in Spain after a bad breakup and an even worse rebound fling.  She’s working in a bar and has just learned that she is about to be kicked out of her housing.

These four end up joining an unorthodox flamenco class in a small town. The first lessons involve learning to step out of your comfort zone.  A lot of this happens around eating churros.  Most of these women are horrified at the idea of eating anything with so many fried carbs covered in chocolate sauce.  But each little act of rebellion against the lives that they are living leads to larger steps until their lives are changed forever.

There is an element of magical realism in this story.  The flamenco teacher Carmen is able to determine exactly what push each of them needs.  She’s a mysterious figure.  You never learn much about her.  She never even teaches them to dance.  They can just magically do it perfectly .  This fits into the stereotype of the “exotic” person who teaches white people to fix themselves and then disappears, presumably to go help others.

I never really warmed up to the characters, except for Laura.  She realizes that she is living in Spain and not some English colony.  She starts to want to get out more and learn some Spanish and interact with the real country.  She moves away from the overwhelming fakeness of her life.  I wanted to back away slowly from the other characters.  Even as the story progresses and you are supposed to start to feel for them I couldn’t get over the horribleness of how they are first described.

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Author Bio –
Isabella May lives in (mostly) sunny Andalucia, Spain with her husband, daughter and son, creatively inspired by the sea and the mountains. When she isn’t having her cake and eating it, sampling a new cocktail on the beach, or ferrying her children to and from after school activities, she can usually be found writing. As a co-founder and a former contributing writer for the popular online women’s magazine, The Glass House Girls – www.theglasshousegirls.com – she has also been lucky enough to subject the digital world to her other favourite pastimes, travel, the Law of Attraction, and Prince (The Purple One). She has recently become a Book Fairy, and is having lots of fun with her imaginative ‘drops’! Costa del Churros is her third novel with Crooked Cat Books, following on from the hit sensations, Oh! What a Pavlova and The Cocktail Bar.

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