This Could Be Everything
By Eva Rice

Transport yourself back to the 1990’s with This Could Be Everything. It even ups the ante with a QR code containing the sound tracks of the era. Discover the blurb and my review below as today I close the Random T. Tours blog tour.

Blurb

From the author of modern classic The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets comes a feel-good novel about hope, love and the powerful bond between sisters. 
 
It’s 1990. The Happy Mondays are in the charts, a 15-year-old called Kate Moss is on the cover of the Face magazine, and Julia Roberts wears thigh-boots for the poster for a new movie called Pretty Woman. 
 
February Kingdom is nineteen years old when she is knocked sideways by family tragedy. Then one evening in May she finds an escaped canary in her kitchen and it sparks a glimmer of hope in her. With the help of the bird called Yellow, Feb starts to feel her way out of her own private darkness, just as her aunt embarks on a passionate and all-consuming affair with a married American drama teacher.   
 
THIS COULD BE EVERYTHING is a coming-of-age story with its roots under the pavements of a pre-Richard Curtis-era Notting Hill that has all but vanished. It’s about what happens when you start looking after something more important than you, and the hope a yellow bird can bring…

 

Review

The year is 1990. I was in the middle of my young childhood. It wasn’t until just a few years later, I would hit my teens, however, I was very aware of the music and film scene in 1990. It was pre-Richard Curtis era (thankfully as I was way too young to watch anything he produced). This Could Be Everything, well, 1990 had that vibe and as a young child realising the earth wasn’t about to spin off its axis and we didn’t fall off the cliff edge, it may well have been everything (I was an imaginative child alright). . I was also a teen in the 90’s and she captures that vibe well of music and fashion and the wider world well.

This Could Be Everything is nostalgic for anyone who lived through it, after all, who wasn’t aware of Kate Moss or Pretty Woman? It was an era of change, of innovations we see and use today and it had a certain grit.
This book is a must to relive it and also listen to the music tracks in the QR code within the book to get you in the mood, just for fun. Revisit New Kids on the Block, Kylie Minogue, The Blues Brothers, Madonna, Erasure and many more. The ingenious QR code in the book links into the list on Spotify. I really liked this idea. 

February Kingdom, aged nineteen also lived through 1990 and it captures that belief of This Could Be Everything type feeling well. This is her take on the year and one where she was coming of age. Turns out humans then aren’t so different from now with tragedies and life continuing on through the darkness. Readers see February’s life and how it tumbled, first with her losing both parents when she was younger and secondly with her losing her twin sister. Just as you think this is going to be an emotionally grim book, it turns out not to be so. February has a lot to deal with on top of the usual stuff of trying to find your place in the world when you step into adulthood and the wider world, but this book has a sunny disposition, not only in the way it is nostalgically written, but in the hope. February comes across a sunny, yellow canary that has flown into her house, whom belongs to Theo, called Yellow. Yellow becomes like a companion, which helps her to navigate life, including grief and makes her want to try to find a future and that light at the end of the tunnel. It shows that things do and can change even when you don’t think it can and as a reader it is easy to root for February.

The book vividly encapsulates its reader, whisking back to 1990 well and what it’s like at that turning point of really growing up. It is a slow burn, but it is well worth sticking with. It is intense at times and lighthearted at times, It’ll take you on a great journey of both nostalgia and the depth of life and all that’s thrown at it.

I totally recommend you get the book, put on the tunes and read!

Thanks to Simon and Schuster for the book, for which I enjoyed a talk about last year and for Random T. Tours for inviting me to review on the blog tour.