Book Review: C’est la Vie: Adventures of an English Grump in Rural France by Ian Moore
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5)

If you’ve ever daydreamed about trading your busy life for a slice of pastoral paradise in the French countryside—then C’est la Vie is your charming wake-up call… served with a side of goat chaos and British wit.

Ian Moore, comedian and reluctant rural hero, brings us another installment of life in the Loire Valley, where serenity is the dream—but reality often involves runaway animals, oddball neighbors, and laugh-out-loud misadventures. The Moore family’s writing retreat, Les Champs Créatifs, may be finished, but the chaos is just beginning.

Moore’s dry, self-deprecating humor shines through on every page. His keen observations of village life, local customs, and the sheer unpredictability of country living are both hilarious and oddly comforting. Whether it's battling stubborn goats, dealing with eccentric locals like the Christmas Pudding Man, or navigating French bureaucracy, Moore delivers it all with comedic timing and heart.

At its core, C’est la Vie is more than a memoir—it’s a love letter to family, resilience, and the messy beauty of following your dreams (even when they come with a lot more animal poop than expected).

Verdict: Equal parts travelogue, comedy, and heartwarming family saga, C’est la Vie is a delightful escape to rural France. Fans of Bill Bryson or Peter Mayle will feel right at home. Just be warned: you’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, and you might just want to pack your bags for the Loire… goats and all.

This is a very funny book about Ian Moore and his family life in rural France. It covers an unspecified length of time, his commuting to the UK and other countries for work. We hear about the animals the family have adopted and how much Junior, one of their horses, appears to hate Ian and treats him with the highest level of distain that it can muster.
How his children and his wife gang up on him when they want to adopt more animals and his fears of performing in French.
It's very readable and I loved it.

I'm not sure if I would be happy to live in a house in the French country (just sold one in Italian country so go figure) but I think some of the most funny book i read are set in the French country.
Like this one: well plotted, witty, clever
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Excellent!

By the time of this, the second book in the series, Ian and his wife Natalie have been living in France for 7 years. They have three sons. Samuel moved out there with them, and Maurice and Thérence were born in France.

Ian is a well-known stand-up comedian. Although the plan had been initially to just do gigs in the UK at the weekend, then back to France, he was becoming more and more known, around the world, not just in the UK. Money was good..... but he was seeing less and less of his family, and their home in France.

They have plans, and have made renovations for their intended activities to make some income in France.

But there were to be setbacks. In the other book, where everything is comedy, this is more like a memoir, we're seeing his real feelings, he's not covering it all up with laughs. I enjoyed this one even more than his previous book. This one was more like a moving abroad memoir in that it was chronological (whereas the first wasn't-that tended to be chapters about certain subjects related). Anyway there's more about France, French way of life, and the family's lives in France in this book than his last one.

Some darker times in here, so the worrying was here, he opened up more, the emotions came through his writing, rather than just turning everything into comedy, which was sort of what his other book was like. I enjoyed this even better. There's still plenty of humour in here too though-I think this is funnier than the first book.

A fabulous read all the way through.