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Title: Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers
Author: Marika Cobbold
Narrator: Veronika Hyks
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
Language: English
Release date: 12-14-09
Publisher: Oakhill Publishing Ltd
Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
Rebecca Finch is a highly successful romantic novelist who has fallen out of love with love. Things look bad. The High Princess of Romance is having a crisis of Faith.
On Mount Olympus, things aren't any easier. Aphrodite's is fretting because divorce is almost as popular as marriage. So with even her favourite earth-bound acolyte, Rebecca Finch, showing signs of disillusionment, Aphrodite resolves to take drastic action.
Critic Reviews:
"Pure romantic comedy, but underlying it is same acerbity that made Shooting Butterflies such an unexpected joy... witty, touching and perceptive....Her touch is a light but acute, her tone easy but flecked with real, black sharpness." (Observer)
Members Reviews:
Let's hear it for mothers - NOT!
I don't know how I feel about this book. It has the usual witty observations and humour you expect from Cobbold, but there's a deeper underlying malice that has me shouting at the book. It's shocking how in today's society over half of all marriages break up, most frequently because the bride and groom never seemed to understand their wedding vows of "for better or for worse" - the people who populate Aphrodite's Workshop are precisely these, the young lovers who never understood what a commitment is, and so rely on the other person to fulfil all their dreams, only to blame them when it doesn't become reality, or lie and cheat, anything to get the other person to the altar, basing their marriage on deceit. In Aphrodite, Cobbold seems to have a lot of venom for women, in particular mothers. We have two examples of marriages that went wrong after the children were born, because mothers got too involved with their own children, or, heaven forfend, put on a bit of weight after having a baby! The men in these cases are allowed to be hapless man-boys, who don't understand that your life has to change after having children, because it can't be all about you anymore, and you have to learn to share (so no, you can't be buying framed comic book art!) You do sympathise with these silly boys because the wives are fanged harridans - I found myself looking up Cobbold's biography, to make sure she wasn't a male writing under a female psyeudonym, and found myself thinking "gender traitor!" when I discovered she was indeed a woman! (I was amazed to find that Cobbold has two children, as all of the heroines in the books of hers that I have read are all childless, and not very sympathetic to children.) In Aphrodite, her Adonis-hero John has a host of psychological issues, all caused by his over-protective mother (CLICHE!) He's a barracuda of a divorce lawyer, yet lets his own ex make mincemeat of him regularly, even using their daughter to get at him. (She makes John take away the gift he had given the girl after she had seen it, but then gives the little girl a puppy, without discussing it with John before the daughter comes to spend her joint-custody time with him. I cannot imagine how a man who has made winning divorce cases his living would put up with a single second of this behaviour - if even his secretary found out about it, never mind his colleaugues, he would be a laughingstock.
