A Year at the Chateau: As seen on the hit Channel 4 show

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They both retell the same event or situation in their own words and it's interesting to see how two people remember and feel differently about the same event or situation. In January 2015 Dick and Angel Strawbridge embarked on the journey of a lifetime when they swapped their cosy two-bedroom flat in East London for a derelict château with 12 acres of land in the Loire valley. It takes you through every magical moment from the purchase of Chateau de la Motte Husson to the celebration of their wedding and Christmas. It was obvious to me that this was all written from memory or that details noted along the way were very sparse.

Sharing their full journey for the first time, A Year at the Chateau follows Dick and Angel from when they first moved to France in the depths of winter and found bedrooms infested with flies, turrets inhabited by bats, the wind rattling through cracked windows, and just one working toilet, which flushed into the moat, through to the monumental efforts that went into readying the chateau for their unforgettable wedding and their incredibly special first Christmas. Nature is described at its best and the couple literally plonk you right in the surroundings with them.Seemed to me that it was a recipe for broken friendships and general disaster but it worked and it was fun to read.

Keeping a huge home warm takes lots of heating and the drama of finding a suitable boiler, numerous radiators for numerous rooms, making holes in metre thick stone walls and laying hundreds of metres of water pipes - yes, literally hundreds of metres, for running water are not problems that the average home owner has to deal with.As warm and entertaining as their much-loved show, A Year at the Château is a truly irresistible story of adventure and heart, epic ambitions and a huge amount of hard graft. As warm and entertaining as their much-loved show, A Year at the Chateau is a truly irresistible story of adventure and heart, epic ambitions and a huge amount of hard graft. The book is well organised (as, it seems, was the work they carried out on the chateau) and very informative - bringing the renovation to life.

A quoted exchange between different people prevents a book from becoming a mundane recounting of, “I went here,” “We did this,” “I thought this,” “We bought this. Sharing their full journey for the first time, A Year at the Château follows Dick and Angel from when they first moved to France in the depths of winter and found bedrooms infested with flies, turrets inhabited by bats, the wind rattling through cracked windows, and just one working toilet, which flushed into the moat, through to the monumental efforts that went into readying the château for their unforgettable wedding and their incredibly special first Christmas. Angel’s lack of knowledge in certain DIY procedures and terms are entertaining, heartwarming and endearing and I can imagine it allows a lot of people out there to relate on some level. That being said I was fascinated and had everyone I know watching this couple renovate what was essentially a fairytale castle in my mind. I will start by saying I've known of Dick, Angel, and their Chateau for a couple of years after finding them on HGTV one night when I couldn't sleep.This novel memoir does show however how a team of two, who have the same dream, can seemingly conquer all, and create a new and amazing life for themselves and their children. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Channel 4 has been following and documenting their journey since 2015 when they bought the derelict château.

While there are certain insights that are interesting (such as expat life in France) but too much is devoted to describing wedding preparations and gushing about how "special" their life is (seriously, three times in one paragraph! A lot of the photos seem to focus on the couples wedding, even though it was beautiful and it is a focus on their business, I felt the readers probably wanted to see the progress of each of the rooms that were spoken about instead. The book is also very written, with each of them writing alternately, adding their own account of the day to day work, as well as their experience of living in France, the great food they enjoyed and the joy of parenthood.

Most fans have watched the series several times during the past year, so we was expecting and excited to received something new and different about the chateau, but I was left not learning anything knew. A Year in the Chateau takes a light-hearted look at a group of friends who decide to pool their resources and who find themselves the owners of a dilapidated chateau in Northern France. Well, if so, I'd say you've probably heard of Dick and Angel Strawbridge and watched their television series Escape to the Château. The dual dialogue that switches between Dick and Angel is also interspersed with recipes Angel loves and that have served them well feeding hordes of workers, helpers and hungry children in between château restoration and renovation work. In 2015 they bought a derelict chateau in the Loire valley and became the subjects of the hugely popular Channel 4 hit Escape to the Chateau.