#Review of This Book Made Me Think Of You by Libby Page @LibbyPageWrites @VikingBooksUK #ThisBookMadeMeThinkOfYou #ContemporaryFiction #RomanticFiction

This Book Made Me Think Of You
By Libby Page

Review by Louise Cannon

Libby Page has done it again and written a warming book that lifts the spirits, whilst the wintry weather in the real world rumbles on. It may just be her best yet at penetrating the heart and soul.
Check out my review and the blurb below, thanks to Penguin for the e-book and opportunity…

Review

This Book Made Me Think of You shows human complexities in relationships and navigating life. It pulls on the heartstrings.

Tilly Nightengale’s birthday has arrived. Imagine receiving 12 handpicked books from your fiance as a gift. Sounds amazing for book lovers right? Except her fiance has sadly died. The carefully chosen books are a gesture to help her through her grief and move onwards with her life. She sets out to begin a vlog in her adventurous journey, she ends up sharing her journey with not just family and friends, but Alfie, a bookshop owner and other followers.

In time, Libby Page takes readers from feeling raw and heart-wrenched from where we initially meet Tilly to warmth and humanity. Tilly is someone you can really get behind and want life and love to co-exist for her again.

The power of books truly lives within and out-with the page, something that is realised and understood within this book. It’s something that seems important for readers and non-readers to truly see and experience as they travel through the complexities of life, loss and love.

Blurb

The unforgettable new novel from Sunday Times bestseller Libby Page

Twelve stories. Twelve months. Once chance to heal her heart . . .

When Tilly Nightingale receives a call telling her there’s a birthday gift from her fiancé waiting for her at her local bookshop, it couldn’t come as more of a shock. Partly because she can’t remember the last time she read a book for pleasure. Mainly because Joe died five months ago . . .

The gift is simple – twelve carefully-chosen books from Joe, one for each month, to help her turn the page on her first year without him.
Tilly sets out on a series of reading-inspired adventures that take her around the world. But as she begins to vlog her journey, her story becomes more than her own. With help from Alfie, the bookshop owner, her budding new following and her friends and family, can Tilly’s year of books show her how to love again?

#BookReview by Lou of This Shining Life by Harriet Kline @HareandHarriet @tabithapelly @DoubledayUK @RandomTTours

This Shining Life
By Harriet Kline

This Shining Life is beautifully written. It’s timely, poignant and warm. If you like Rachel Joyce’s books, you’re sure to like This Shining Life. I highly recommend it!
Discover more in the blurb and my full review and a bit about the author. That is when you can take your eyes off the gorgeous cover.
Thanks to Random Things Tours for inviting me onto the blog tour for reviewing and for them and for publisher – Double Day for gifting the physical proof of the book.

Blurb

For Rich, life is golden.

He fizzes with happiness and love.

But Rich has an incurable brain tumour.

When Rich dies, he leaves behind a family without a father, a husband, a son and a best friend. His wife, Ruth, can’t imagine living without him and finds herself faced with a grief she’s not sure she can find her way through.

At the same time, their young son Ollie becomes intent on working out the meaning of life. Because everything happens for a reason. Doesn’t it?

But when they discover a mismatched collection of presents left by Rich for his loved ones, it provides a puzzle for them to solve, one that will help Ruth navigate her sorrow and help Ollie come to terms with what’s happened. Together, they will learn to lay the ghosts of the past to rest, and treasure the true gift that Rich has left them: the ability to embrace life and love every moment.

Wonderfully funny and achingly beautiful, this is a story about love in all its forms: absent, lost and, ultimately, regained.

Review

Meet Ollie, Nessa, Angran, Rich, Ruth and Marjorie, the main characters who take a few chapters or so at a time to create this beautiful book. What hits and made me take a sharp intake of breath, was the first line of the first chapter, after the prologue. What is said is insumountable and very matter of fact. It’s a strong opening! Every so often, one line punctuates the opening to a chapter, that is stark and true and just fabulous. No beating about the bush, it tells of a life event how it is and for what it is. In this instance, I like that and it fits the book so well. You’ll have to read the book to find out what it is…

This book will tug at anyone’s heartstrings, like the saddest tune from a solo violin at the very least, and certain short, sharp sentence (I won’t say what or it will spoil it), may pierce hard through your very being and reverberate round. It’s terrific and matter of fact! The book is also full of love and the warmth that brings.

Grief is inescapable at the moment and that’s what makes this book, perhaps even more timely and poignant. It beautifully portrays grief and being surrounded by it within a family very well and truthfully. It shows how people have different ideas for what to do when someone dies and how grief isn’t the same for everyone. It’s also about the love of dead loved ones and the comfort from the living.

There is also the mismatched presents that Rich had left, which further shows his love of life and the people around him. It also keeps people busy as they try to fix them out.

The book, although emotional, is far from depressing. It has that warmth and some pockets of humour. There’s other parts of life being shown as having being lived, such as a a well stocked up picnic. The nature provides a layer of peacefulness along with the layer of anguish of death, love and life that converges together.

The peacefulness of nature is conveyed exquisitely against the forefront of the sting and in Ruth’s case, especially, the almost suffocation, sometimes claustrophobic feeling of grief closing in and confusion of grief, that all of the characters feel in one way or another. It is all brought with tenderness, but an absolute realism, right to the very end and with the comfort and love of the supporting characters.

About the Author

HARRIET KLINE works part time registering births, deaths and marriages and writes for the rest of the week. Her story Ghost won the Hissac Short Story Competition and Chest of Drawers won The London Magazine Short Story Competition. Other short stories have been published online with Litro, For Books’ Sake, and ShortStorySunday, and on BBC Radio 4.

#Review by Lou – To Start The Year From Its Quiet Centre by Victoria Bennett @VikBeeWyld @kenyon_isabelle #Poetry

To Start The Year From Its Quiet Centre
By Victoria Bennett

Poems that are surprisingly uplifting, thought provokingly honest and that evoke peace can be found in ‘To Start The Year From Its Quiet Centre’.
Thanks to Isabelle Kenyon for gifting me the PDF copy of the book and for the blog tour invite.
Meander down to the blurb and review to discover more.

Blurb

These poems are an intimate meditation on love and loss, told by a daughter as she cares for her mother through terminal mesothelioma. The poet invites the reader to be witness to the private moments of dying, from the physical reality of caregiving through to the alchemy of death, telling the story of a relationship between women that is transformed through grief.

Honest, unsentimental, and quietly uplifting.

Review

Telling it how it is when you’ve lost a loved one, is a thread that runs through these poems. They are contemplative and reflective in the quietness that someone dying brings. There is a strength of character that ebbs through the grief that brings an air of honesty, warmth and uplifting peace in the poems.

All the poems, unsentimentally, tell of how watching and knowing someone is going to die can be. How the medics gather round and how the void begins to materialise. There’s a poem “How To Watch Someone Die,” which gives excellent and sound advice on preparing yourself. These poems are wise and full of experience. This is however not devoid of compassion, there is that in spades.

The weight of loss and watching someone (in this case, a mother) deteriorating in illness is framed well. There is a poem of how bulbs are planted, that is uplifting and also one called “After The War, The Battle Comes” about how your loved one never 100% leaves you as elements are within you. There are others, eluding to something simlar and how they are always on your mind, even though you go and explore somewhere new.

The poems evoke many emotions and many people will be able to relate to something within them and some may also find some comfort. All emotion is stripped back to an honesty of how watching someone dying can be. It shows another side, which is intellegently done, that isn’t all about crying as such or being angry etc. I think for some people. they may find this thought-provoking as each poem cascades from one to another, bound by the threads of watching a loved one die and the aftermath.

About The Author

Victoria Bennett founded Wild Women Press in 1999 and has spent the last 21 years facilitating creative experiences and curating platforms for women to share ideas, stories, inspirations and actions for positive change, including the global #WildWomanWeb movement and #WildWomanGamer. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University (2002). Previous awards include the Northern Debut Award for non-fiction (2020), the Mother’s Milk Writing Prize (2017), The Writing Platform Digital Literature Bursary (2015), Northern Promise Award for Poetry (2002), and the Waterhouse Award for Poetry (2002).

Her work-in-progress memoir, ‘All My Wild Mothers’, was long-listed for the Nan Shepherd Nature Writing Prize 2019 and the Penguin #WriteNow2020 programme.

Victoria is currently undertaking her MRes in Creative Practice at the University of Highlands and Islands (Shetland), exploring narratives of absence within landscapes of personal and ecological loss. She is a director of The Wizard and The Wyld Ltd, creating immersive playable poetry within video-game platforms. A frequent digital collaborator, she interested in how poetry and new technologies can be used to create meaningful and authentic narratives. http://beewyld.co.uk/

#BookReview by Lou – The Imposter by Anna Wharton @whartonswords @MantleBooks @panmacmillan @RKbookpublicist @RandomTTours #TheImposter #Thriller #PsychologicalThriller

The Imposter
By Anna Wharton

Highly emotional, either experienced in at least part or very well-researched, The Imposter tells the story of Chloe and how she handles her nan who has Alzheimers and her job of newspaper archivist and the newsprint cuttings she discovers of a missing girl from years ago and how involved she gets with her parents. It’s compelling to the end with secrets to unravel… Please find more in the blurb and my full review below…
Published 1st April.

About the Author

ANNA WHARTON has been a print and broadcast journalist for more than twenty years, writing for newspapers including The Times, Guardian, Sunday Times Magazine, Grazia and Red. She was formally an executive editor at The Daily Mail. Anna has ghostwritten four memoirs including the Sunday Times bestseller Somebody I Used To Know and
Orwell Prize longlisted CUT: One Woman’s Fight Against FGM in Britain Today. The Imposter is her first novel.

Blurb

A girl who went missing. A family who never gave up. A lonely young woman who only wanted to help . . .
Anna Wharton’s fiction debut, The Imposter, is a gripping story of obsession, loneliness and the lies we tell ourselves in order to live with ourselves . . .
Chloe lives a quiet life. Working as a newspaper archivist in the day and taking care of her Nan in the evening, she’s happy simply to read about the lives of others as she files away the news clippings from the safety of her desk.
But there’s one story that she can’t stop thinking about. The case of Angie Kyle – a girl, Chloe’s age, who went missing as a child. A girl whose parents never gave up hope.
When Chloe’s Nan gets moved into a nursing home, leaving Chloe on the brink of homelessness, she
takes a desperate step: answering an ad to be a lodger in the missing girl’s family home. It could be the
perfect opportunity to get closer to the story she’s read so much about. But it’s not long until she
realizes this couple aren’t all they seem from the outside . . .
But with everyone in the house hiding something, the question is – whose secrets are the most
dangerous?

Review

Chloe has work at the newspaper and her nan who has Alzheimers on her mind. It’s a tough gig as her nan’s care needs to move on a pace and the house to be sold. Having been there, done that, I can relate to this part of what Chloe is going through and I am sure many other readers will be able to as well.

Everyone’s worst nightmare would for their nan to disappear. Chloe’s nan, Grace Hudson goes missing in a cemetery, creating the upmost heart-rendering scenes and at work, to try and keep herself busy as the police investigate, but to compound matters further, her nan is brought even more to the forefront of her mind as she finds a newspaper cutting about a woman called Angie who had gone missing; but her friend, Hollie tries to provide some comfort, until she is found. It signals a real need for extra care and Park House Care Home appears to be the chosen place to do it. These scenes, the emotions, the environment, the behaviours from her nan of her drifting off and back again as photos are shows, and the things that she doesn’t often wear, are keenly observed and accurate, either by experiencing it all to some degree or another, or incredibly well-researched.

Chloe then gives herself time to work on the intriguing newspaper cutting in the archives, of the mysterious disappearance of Angel and how heartbroken her parents – Patrick and Maureen Kyle were and discovers more newspaper cuttings about a vigil and more and ends up plunging into investigative work herself as she reads how she wasn’t found. It observes grief and how everyone grieves differently, but also how hard and isn’t always understood compassionately by another who is different from you. I think there’s a lot that readers will be able to relate to in terms of loss and a sense of wanting to belong and a desire to reach the truth by character and reader really pierces through in the book as the secrets start to emerge.

It’s an all involving read that goes a quite a pace with some spine-chilling, evocative parts within it, especially in those final chapters, but ultimately it’s a story of one of the saddest books I’ve ever read, but a book that is a page-turner and one that I do think people will really like for all that is within it that compells the story always onwards.