Tag: romance

Love & Loss in Sicily 🏖 The House by the Sea by Louise Douglas.

I was not sure The House by the Sea was going to be an enjoyable read at all at first, as ex-spouses Joe and Edie reunite in Italy because Joe’s aunt has left them her house in her will. Frosty atmosphere is an understatement, couldn’t cut it with a knife. As the pair explore, start to clear up the house, enjoy the sights, and meet the locals, they begin to thaw. There are a few different mysteries to the story. One of those being Joe’s aunt, Anna DeLuca. Edie could not stand the woman. I thought it was strange how thick the hatred was and was prepared to have an open mind on Anna DeLuca, until I knew more. As we learn more about Edie, we also discover Anna’s heart wrenching story. The House by the Sea, towards the end, kicked up a gear and kept me questioning and trying to join the dots. It was very compelling.

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July 31, 2022

blog, Book review, mystery, romance
Book Review. Flesh and Blood by Andrew Shanahan.

Ben is back, and this time he has mixed weed into his biscuits, and his dog, Brown, has made a new friend, in stuffed toy, Bear. Ben, in the last book, had left the relative safety of his home and in Flesh and Blood has adapted to a new reality, a new home – a ship Our Kid. I thought that was a cool idea. Of all the inaccessible places you couldn’t ever get inside, with a chunk of the Earth’s population dead suddenly you can go where you please. ‘I could have died in warmth and comfort, stoned out of my mind, listening to Abba.’

Ben has cancer, so decides he needs to reach a hospital, and what may seem ‘only’ 6 miles, is an obstacle course for an ailing Ben. This is an obstacle course that comes with a barge with a beeping alarm, which attracts the attention of the Wraths, who follow him along the Canal, and he then takes a dip in that canal, having a crash course in how to drive and eventually reaching the hospital in one piece, only to get a gas canister smashed into his face.

Our other character is Helen, a woman Ben had a brief relationship with in Before and After. We follow her version of events since they split up, becoming a surrogate mum for her gay best friend, and his husband. I did not like the best friend, Martin. I did not understand the significance of his character. ‘The thing with Martin is that you can only deny him for so long. Eventually, he’ll just do what he wants, so it’s really about how stubborn you want to be and how long you can thwart him.’

I only got alarm bells from reading about Martin.

I thought that Helen’s story was different in tone from Ben’s. Ben’s story is tragic, and eerie, whereas Helen bought it back to before the end of the world had happened.

The humour is so much more subtle in Flesh and Blood, the horror less so and I thought it was an entertaining read, if that is the correct word to use? Flesh and Blood is about survival, making wrong, bad and poor decisions, carrying on, and trying to be safe.

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June 7, 2022

blog, Book review, Fiction, romance, Sci fi
Book Review. The Golden Oldies Guesthouse by Dee MacDonald.

‘And that was how they found Over and Above. It stood there, in splendid isolation, a large Edwardian heap in an overgrown garden, blinds down, empty and forlorn.’
The Golden Oldies Guesthouse by Dee MacDonald

Couple Tess and Simon live in London and they are on their belated honeymoon, in Cornwall, when they come upon a house, which they fall in love with. They plan to make it into a guesthouse. The story follows their initial forays into finding tradesmen, who can fix up their new property into somewhere habitable for guests to want to stay. They stumble across problems along the way, such as a sports car tends to be an unsuitable vehicle for tight country lanes and doesn’t offer much room for all the bits and pieces you will need when renovating. Tess and Simon do not seem to be able to communicate very well as a pair and have their differences along the way too. This first part of The Golden Oldies Guesthouse was fine, but it did read like a checklist of fairly standard incidences that happen when you move and are in a new area, trying to get your bearings. The second part I preferred because that is when the guests began to arrive, and we learn more about their characters. The guests are arriving for their own myriad reasons, with one or two keeping those reasons to themselves. Dominic’s arrived in Cornwall to write, and falls in love, which was a tale that was touching. And The Golden Oldies Guesthouse did feel like Dominic’s story at this point. With one of the guests, Celia, making off at the end of the book like Marion in the Hitchcock film Psycho.

The Golden Oldies Guesthouse was an entertaining and fun read.

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March 15, 2022

blog, Book review, Bookblog, Fiction, romance
Finding Henry Applebee by Celia Reynolds

Waterstones
Foyles for books

The story of Henry Applebee is primarily narrated by the man himself, although characters Ariel and Travis do take parts in being protagonists. The timeline of the story switches between past and present. I was unsure of this book at first, until I got the gist of which path the story was going to take. Not that it is predictable. There is a huge build up, you have to wait for it though. I liked the setting of the train station in the present and loved being in Blackpool for the past. This is a story of lost love and once you discover how Henry met this woman and lost her because of his insecurities (and mobile phones hadn’t been invented) it did make my eyes mist over.

Unfortunately, the story lost its way in its conclusion. I felt like the author was trying to repeat what happened to Henry with Ariel and Travis, who all meet on the train. I didn’t feel invested in the other characters as much. The ending is not automatically a happy one, which is realistic.

My final thoughts are I loved (ha) the love story in Finding Henry Applebee. The other parts not so much. It is set partly during World War 2, so if you like reading historical fiction books, I’m sure you will like this. I’m probably going to read this book again and love it.

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June 10, 2020

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my thoughts on 2 murder mystery books

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie 4/5

Can you imagine how fun it must be (I’m kidding) sitting down and imagining … these murder scenarios? Do the writers fox themselves? Because characters, even if we do ultimately control them, still do what they damn well like.

I also love Agatha Christie’s dialogue. I think I have said it before in a review, but I bloody love good dialogue. It’s like music to my ears, when you read some dialogue and it has a bit of bite to it and a bit of humour. It’s pleasing. Roddy Doyle is another author that I like for dialogue.

I think I want dialogue to mirror real life. Which is why there are no rules to writing. You would have dozens of editors complaining if how we spoke to each other was put in our stories. It wouldn’t make sense. Unfinished thoughts, talking over one another, repetition, some coarse language. Of course, accents and dialects too. Do you feel perhaps in stories we try to replicate the perfect scenario? Isn’t that why we read stories, we expect a start, middle and end. I personally love reading stories that don’t really have a story, more happenings. I read a book a couple of months ago like that. It was Keith Waterhouse’s There is a Happy Land. It’s a beautiful book. I probably read it once every couple of years. I don’t have my own copy of it. I know where it is in the public library and I pluck it off the shelves periodically. Pluck is the wrong word. The shelves are packed tightly in my public library and it’s more of a shuffle, tug, pull, shuffle, break a nail and a yank. Then you realise it’s the wrong book and not what you want after all and have to get it back in.

Anyway, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was a hit with me. It’s all very clear and obvious whodunnit by the explanation at the end, isn’t it?

Another mystery I read was

Hate Bale: A Rural Cosy Mystery by Stephanie Dogg 3/5

Hate Bale is very cosy. It has romance, humour and its setting and characters were different (depends what you’ve been reading, I guess) The murders though are brutal, when you think about what you are reading. The ending was wordy, and it went from 60 to 100 in the space of 3? chapters. I felt the plot and the pacing could have been tightened. It did meander, not that I mind a meander. Other readers may not.
Not a bad read though. I liked it.

April 28, 2020

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