"Love isn't always plain sailing," although in Going Dutch it's not sailing but motoring in a barge that underpins the story. Jo, recently separated from her husband, Philip, after he took up with a much younger woman, is renting a barge as accommodation while she works out what to do with her life. She's had no job apart from bringing up her daughter, Karen, now living in Canada, and can't face being with the people in her village and seeing her husband's younger, thinner girlfriend.

Dora has just broken off her engagement to John, her boyfriend of four years, and at twenty-two isn't sure what to do next - although she is sure she can't live at home and deal with all the recriminations and village talk. When her best friend, Karen, suggests that she lodge on the barge with Jo, it seems like a great opportunity. Perhaps Dora can find a job in London and pick up the threads of a new life.

Jo and Dora get along well and are soon making friends and getting involved with others people living on barges. Dora meets Tom, a young man who works at the boatyard but wants to go traveling. Theirs is just a friendship, of course, but Tom's doing his best to help Dora grow in confidence and do new things; perhaps she's finding his friendship more important to her than she originally thought. Jo meets up with Marcus, someone she knew thirty years before when she was engaged to Philip. When they discover that the barge needs to go to Holland for some maintenance, the barge owner hires Marcus to skipper it across the channel. Marcus's girlfriend comes along for the ride, but is there something more going on between Marcus and Jo than she is aware of?

Going Dutch is Katie Fforde's thirteenth novel and is very like her others in tone and feel. It's a comfortable, cozy read with lots of quintessential Englishness (people always drinking tea) and some very interesting descriptions of life on a barge, both stationary and traveling. However, in some ways this book is a little disappointing. It takes rather a long time to get going, and although the section about crossing to Holland is interesting, the main characters seem to spend more time making cups of tea than anything else. Some characters seem rather one-dimensional, particularly Carole, Marcus's girlfriend, and Susanna, the new girlfriend of Jo's husband. There is a strange emphasis on the fact that Jo and Dora are middle-class even though they speak and behave in a rather more upper-class fashion; the regular reference to their class doesn't seem to fit. Jo, for example, after an hour's conversation with an expert, is able to restore antiques well enough to make a living out of it; Dora gets a day at the races courtesy of her father. These don't seem like typical English middle-class pursuits.

The boating aspect gives the story a lot of charm, but it also sometimes means that the story drags. The actual romance angle seems tacked on at the end, particularly for Jo, with no real exploration as to whether she would be happy with Marcus. Tom and Dora's instant friendship is understandable on her side (she's lonely for company her age) but not entirely on his - it's not clear what he sees in her initially. There is a lack of realism in many of the events: Jo's antique restoration, as mentioned before, and Dora's ability to get a job instantly in the boatyard without even being interviewed.

It's an easy book to read and the characters are appealing, particularly Jo as she comes to terms with being in her fifties and single again, but the book drags a little in places and the relationships between the women and their men aren't well enough developed to please this picky reviewer.