The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted

 The Provence Cure for the Broken Hearted by Bridget Asher

To appease her mother, Heidi and her son Abbot head out to spend a summer in their family home in Provence, ostensibly to begin renovations after a small fire, but really because her mother feels they aren't recovering from the loss of Heidi's husband two years earlier in a car accident. She hopes a change will help them move on.

Travelling with them is Heidi's teenage neice, a sullen girl who doesn't seem to get along with anybody but Heidi. She's going because her father and Heidi's sister have just married and want some time to themselves, but Heidi has a secret nobody will be able to ignore for long.

In France, they get off to a rough start when they are robbed of their luggage and most of their devices before they even get to the house. Fortunately a neighbour rescues them - a man Heidi knew as a child when she spent summers in Provence. He's handsome, kind, and also dealing with loss since his wife divorced him and took up with his brother. The fact that she and their daughter now live with the brother brings another layer of family tension to the plot, and on the romance front,  well, you can guess where that is heading.

It's fairly well written with mostly credible characters and plot, and it addresses real life issues, albeit in a romantic setting that isn't anything like real life for most people. It's predictable and a little corny, but as Anna Quindlen said in "How Reading Changed My Life":  

"...reading has as many functions as the human body, and ...not all of them are cerebral. One is mere entertainment, the pleasurable whiling away of time."

The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted is that: a pleasureable whiling away of time. I enjoyed it.