Honestly, this is not all that great. I like the main character, Marianne, and I like that the author has made a woman in her sixties the romantic heroine of a story, but Marianne doesn't make up for the rest of the characters, who are legion. I consider myself a moderately intelligent person but half the time I couldn't tell them apart - there's so many of them, and their presentations are all so superficial, and their problems are all the same. Everyone here has romantic woes, each more dramatic than the last, and I might have been able to deal with it if they weren't all tarred with the quirky brush. They don't come across as people to me, more a collection of supposedly interesting characteristics walking around in human form... the sculptor obsessed with stone; the former air hostess with Alzheimer's who takes in stray cats, names them after French royal mistresses and sets out food for them on expensive china; the restaurant owner who keeps a room like a shrine, full of clothes from the time, thirty years back, when she was in love... I suspect it's supposed to come across as magical, but mostly it just seemed forced.