Tag: #rararesources

#Review By Lou of Under A Riviera Moon By Helen McGinn @knackeredmutha @BoldwoodBooks @rararesources #UnderARivieraMoon

Under A Riviera Moon
By Helen McGinn

Review by Louise Cannon (Lou)

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Under A Riviera Moon is the second book I have read by Helen McGinn and after sinking rather nicely into the previous one, The Island of Dreams, I was delighted to review another for the blog tour. Under A Riviera Moon is Helen McGinn’s 5th stand-alone book.

Below you’ll find more about the book in the blurb, my review and a bit about the author who also knows her stuff when it comes to wine in the Saturday Kitchen.
What’s more is the book is perfect for fans of Carol Kirkwood, Karen Swan and Erica James.

Blurb

The BRAND NEW read from Saturday Kitchen’s Helen McGinn

When a heartsick Maggie is sent on an errand by her mother to Cannes, she is keen to get it over with as quickly as possible.

She has been tasked with collecting a treasured box of photos from her late grandmother Elizabeth’s best friend, the impossibly glamorous Allegra Morgon who is desperate to tell Maggie all about the year she and Elizabeth spent in Paris. The sixties were in full swing, the air hummed with jazz, artists and students made the streets their own, and the City of Love was weaving its magic. And against this backdrop, two people were beginning a love story that would last a lifetime – but be over too soon.

As Maggie hears more about Allegra’s life, first in Paris, then New York, and finally on the Riviera, she is captivated and inspired. Was life always leading Maggie to this moment, this beautiful place so she could finally learn to stop living in the past? Because if she can, then another love story for the ages might just be within her reach…

Review

Set in the 60’s in Paris makes Under A Riviera Moon interesting and quite different. Helen McGinn paints a picture with words, so you can visualise the places her characters go and hear the jazz music playing. It’s all rather immersive.

Spanning 3 generations, there is a lot of life about the place as well as love and loss.
In the present day, there is Maggie who has got a lot on her plate. She’s divorced and there are uncertainties surrounding her career. She takes a trip to Scotland and this unexpectedly sends her to France to collect her grandmother’s belongings from Allegra, her grandmother’s friend. This in turn leads to a fascinating look into Allegra’s life and more importantly, Maggie’s grandmother’s whom it would seem she didn’t know much about at all in her younger days.

Under A Riviera Moon is captivating and fascinating reading about what was happening in 60’s France. With rich threads within the plot in an interesting time and setting, Under A Riviera Moon is a great holiday or wet weather read to lose yourself into for some escapism.

About the Author

Helen McGinn is a wine writer & broadcaster, international wine judge and author of the award-winning Knackered Mother’s Wine Guide book and blog. She spent almost a decade sourcing wines around the world as a supermarket buyer and now appears regularly on BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen and ITV’s This Morning as their wine expert. She writes about drinks for Waitrose Food Magazine among others and awards include Fortnum & Mason’s Online Drink Writer of the Year.
Her bestselling debut novel This Changes Everything was published in February 2021 and her second fiction book In Just One Day later that same year. This Is Us, her third novel, was released in September 2022 and her fourth, The Island of Dreams, in February 2024. Her latest book, Under A Riviera Moon, is published in April 2025.

#Interview with quick #review By Lou with author Alice May of The Trials of Annabeth Hope @AliceMay_Author @BookGuild @rararesources #BlogTour

The Mid-life Trials of Annabeth Hope
By Alice May

Written by Louise Cannon

Today, as part of the Rachel Random Resources Blog Tour, I am pleased to welcome Alice May to answer some questions about The Trials of Annabeth Hope. Firstly, let’s find out what the book is about and briefly, what I thought of it. In the interview, we covered many interesting topics about writing, her daughter, other professions she’s worked in, cancel culture, ending in something positive and hopeful.

Annabeth Hope Cover

Two very different worlds are about to collide.

Feisty country girl Annabeth Hope has sworn off men since her ex abandoned her. Juggling three resentful step-teens, a hyperactive toddler, a smallholding, and a herd of rescued llamas, she has her hands full.

With the roof about to collapse on her crumbling New Forest home, she is desperate to find a way to hold her patchwork family together. The last thing she needs is an attractive distraction moving in next door.

Burnt-out inner-city doctor Rick Mahon has left London and his medical career behind in a moment of professional crisis. A malpractice lawsuit is on the horizon, and the cancel culture mob are snapping at his heels. His plan to stay under the radar is thrown off course when he meets his new neighbour and sparks start to fly.

Annabeth and Rick couldn’t be more different, but maybe they hold the key to each other’s happiness…

“What more could we want from life? Family, friends, llamas, and hope…

I read The Trials of Annabeth Hope and recommend it. It’s an engrossing read of trouble and strife, swearing off men after one abandoned her, trying to keep a family together, with troubling teens and a hyperactive toddler as well as quite literally trying to keep a roof over everyone’s head, even a leaky one.
There’s a nice distraction in the form of burn out doctor Rick Mahon, who moves next door, even if he is trying to have a quieter life as professional disaster looms.
The book has many thought-provoking points, but is also a good escape.

Without further ado, let’s move onto the questions and answers.

  1. What or who inspired you to write a novel?

My daughter has been the biggest inspiration to start writing. I always wanted to, even as a child, but I didn’t know where to start and I didn’t think that I would be good enough. In contrast, my daughter wanted to write and just jolly well got on with it. She writes as Hannah Kingsley, and Soul Hate, the first book in her new fantasy/romantasy trilogy is coming out next year. Her determination to succeed made me realise that if I didn’t start writing, then there was no chance of my stories ever making it into print. She has encouraged me every-step of the way and I can’t thank her enough. It means so much tome to hold a copy of The Mid-life Trials of Annabeth Hope in my hands and know that I did it. I write a book.  🙂

2. You’ve had many professions, A former GP surgery manager, school librarian and art teacher, has any of this helped you in your writing career and if so, in what way(s)?

They have all helped in my writing career in different ways. My years as a GP surgery manager played a huge part in the inspiration for Rick’s storyline in The Mid-life Trials of Annabeth Hope(see next question for more on that)and informed the chapters set beyond the waiting room of his GP surgery.
My experience as a school librarian was extremely educational in terms of understanding the different genres of books out there and different readers reactions to them. I also learned a lot about how the book world works in terms of the sourcing of books for libraries. Things like: who choses them and what libraries are looking for in terms of supplying the needs of their clients?
It was also lovely to work surrounded by books and a delight to share stories with pupils of all ages, the teaching staff and the wider school community.
My work as an art teacher in combination with my NHS  experience has been instrumental in developing the creativity for wellbeing and general self-care aspects of the overall theme of the book.

3. You have a trigger warning about an NHS worker’s mental health, has any of this come from experience of working in a GP surgery?

Yes. Unfortunately, during my twenty years of working in the NHS I was very aware of a huge increase in the levels of burnout in many health professionals. While The Mid-life Trials of Annabeth Hope isn’t based on any one true story, it is an amalgamation of the many different pressures that modern life puts on our medics and support staff.

4. You set your book in the New Forest, where you live. Are any of the places recognisable in your book or have you gone down the line of using artistic licence and either way, what influenced your decision?

I have used artistic license. Descriptions of the wider area of the forest, and some specific locations are real and recognisable. However, the village of Ambleford, where much of the action takes place, is a fiction of my imagination, as are the characters. I don’t want my friends and neighbours thinking I have written about them, because that wouldn’t be fair and could get awkward. Having said that, Ambleford is an amalgamation of two gorgeous villages near my home. Ihave taken the parade of shops from one and set it next to the village green of the other. In my mind, it is the perfect village. After all, if you’re going to make something up, then you might as well do it properly.

5. You talk about the cancel culture snapping at the heels’ of your main character. What are your views of cancel culture?

I find the whole cancel culture ‘thing’ incredibly scary. The threat that this phenomenon poses to freedom of speech is huge. The fact that people can be found virtually ‘guilty’ of something without ever having any point of redress, or without the grace of being innocent until proven guilty through the proper presentation of evidence, is deeply alarming . Social media enhances these issues, allowing people to ‘pile on’ anonymously from behind their keyboards when they haven’t really researched what it is they are getting involved in. I’d like to say that I have an answer to it, but I don’t.

6. You have strife and hope as you weave readers through the mid-life stage of adulthood. How did you arrive at creating some positivity and how much do you feel reading books that address it are important for people approaching or living through this part of life?

I believe that there is incredible power in stories. As human beings we connect with each other through our experiences. Reading about others in our situation and how they deal with things can be a huge comfort, especially during difficult times. So, while I was at pains to be realistic in the difficulties that my two main characters Annabeth and Rick are facing(and I have really ramped some of those issues up to add to the drama, because I’m a writer and that’s my job),I also wanted there to be a light at the end of the tunnel. I genuinely believe that, in most cases, even though something bad might be happening, it is rare that things are all bad. Usually, there will be something good happening too, but you might need to search to find it.

7. What’s next for you on the horizon?

Next on the horizon is more writing. I am already knee-deep in the next book set in Ambleford as part of The Forest Families Series, which is fun. It’s a completely standalone story that allows me to connect back in with some of my favourite supporting characters from The Mid-life Trials of Annabeth Hope, like Barbara Trenchard. I have also written the first in a World War Two series. This is set in the New Forest too and explores some of the exciting, true stories of bravery from people in my local area. Now I have started writing, I don’t think I am going to be able to stop. 🙂

Annabeth Hope Cover

#Review By Lou of Rodasauri the Dinosaur’s Trip to London By Lainey Dee Happy Publication Day @rararesources #Dinosaurs #Christmas #ChildrensBook #ChristmasBook

Rodasauri the Dinosaur’s Trip to London, 2nd Edition
By Lainey Dee

Review By Louise Cannon

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Rodasauri banner

Children often like dinosaurs and Christmas. This book contains both in a fun entertaining book for 3 plus. I am on the Rachel Random Resources blog tour with a review, first, lets dino-print it down to the blurb…

Dino cover

Blurb

Rodasauri the Dinosaur’s Trip to London Rodasauri the Diplodocus has always dreamed of experiencing a proper London Christmas. On his way to find this land of sparkling decorations, he meets the generous Father Christmas who helps him get to London, taking him on a tour of all the wonderful and diverse Christmas treats that London has to offer. What Rodasauri finds is a place of love and friendship, filled with many different people—and now a dinosaur!—who all join together to celebrate the spirit of Christmas.

Review

Rodasauri the Diplodocus is a fun adventure to London at Christmas time. The dinosaur, and young readers find out what Christmas time has to offer, including carol singing and Christmas trees. There’s also the warmth of friendship to be discovered too. In this case, in humans, Rose and Thomas and other people too.

For readers, whether they’re familiar with London or not, this is a sweet feel-good book with lovely illustrations that encapsulate the story well to draw children in. The way the sentences appear on some of the pages also do this.

It’s a lovely Christmas read for young children, whether it’s as they’re cosied up ready for a bedtime or quiet time story in the build-up to Christmas or for a Christmas present.

About the Author

Lainey Dee was born in Birmingham UK. She has always been passionate about caring for children and made this her career.

Lainey is an accredited nanny and holds the NNEB certificate. She has worked both in children’s nurseries and as a private nanny.

Her inspiration to write ‘Rodasauri the Dinosaur’s Trip to London‘ came while caring for Thomas and Rose, age five, who have a huge dinosaur collection and can remember and pronounce all of the difficult names.

Lainey lives in a house built in the 1930s and decorated in that style of period. She enjoys museums, walking, visiting National Trust properties and theatre shows.

 

#Extract of The Secret Daughter of Venice by JulietGreenwood @julietgreenwood @Stormbooks_co @rararesources #TheSecretDaughterOfVenice

The Secret Daughter of Venice
By Juliet Greenwood

Presented by the author and publisher, I have an extract to share with you of The Secret Daughter of Venice as part of a Random Resources Blog Tour.

The Secret Daughter of Venice

This extract comes from early on in the story when Kate, the heroine, retreats to her room in a faded Tudor mansion near Stratford-upon-Avonafter an argument with her father. Not only is he refusing to tell her anything about her past, or her true parentage, but is determined she will remain at home and marry a conveniently rich man to restore the family fortunes, rather than follow her heart and become a painter, and to find her lost mother.
Reaching her own room, Kate curled herself tight on the window seat. Outside, thelast of the light was beginning to fade from the landscape. A faint hint of woodsmokehung in the air, drifting up fromthe remains of cooking fires in Brierley-in-Arden, safein its hollow, while the breathy hoot of owls echoed across the surrounding undulationof woods and fields.Before the war, there had always been the distant glow of light from the lampsand candlesas night fell, but now the village was muffled in blackout darkness. Crouching, like all the villages throughout England and far beyond, waiting for thedeep drone of bombers overhead.Kate had painted the scene so often in her sketchbook in daylight hours thatshe could still see it in her mind’s eye. The walls of the kitchen garden, with its neatrows of vegetables and the tall wigwams of twigs and canes supporting theramblings of peas and beans between espaliered trees of peach and apple. Thefields beyond, once more turned into the growing of cabbages and potatoes, just as they had been during the last war. The war to end all wars, which had left so manyfathers and uncles, sons and brothers as no more than names on the memorial nextto the duck pond on Brierley’s village green.The house felt emptier than ever. Hollowed out without the creak of footstepsin its vastness, the distant murmur of voices emanating from the bedrooms as hersisters dreamed of their futures, or her brothers discussed some plan or other to takeoff in the Austin to walk in the Lakes, free from Papa’s eagle eye. She even missedWill, who as the son and heir, could not be contradicted. During his last return onleave from France, he had been particularly loud in joining the condemnation ofMussolini, for whom he had particular scorn. At least Hitler and Spain’s Franco wereproper soldiers, he had declared, not a fat vulgar little man like il Duce.

Closing the blackout curtains, she lit her candle, and turned her attention to the flyleaf of the leatherbound book of Shakespeare’s sonnets balanced on her knees. For Katerina. Not Kate, not Katherine. Her real name. She rolled the word around her mouth as she traced the swirl of the writing, spidery, faint, as if the writer barely had the strength to hold the pen. Katerina. The page wavered in front of her. That was her first memory of Arden House. A bewildered little girl with salt spray in her hair, abruptly torn from everything she knew, shivering in the silk dress made for the heatof a Mediterranean summer, her skin absorbing the penetrating damp of the booklined room. And the strange man who had brought her here, standing tall and severe, and so very old in a child’s eyes, instructing her to call him ‘Papa’. She was to speak only English, he’d told her, and be Katerina, the inconveniently foreign child no longer. ‘You are Kate,’ Leo Arden had said, with the severity of a school master instilling discipline in a class. ‘Kate Arden. You have no other name. It does not exist. It never existed. And you will look a damn fool if you try to say otherwise. You don’t want those who love you to be ashamed of you, do you?’
His blue eyes had sharpened at her silence, as the child’s instinct for survival had fought the rebellion within her soul. She had seen something flicker in their depths. Love? Guilt? Or, she had begun to wonder as she grew older, if it had been simply distaste. Regret, even. That first evening he had abruptly turned away towards the children, all older and bigger than her, crowding at the door, curious, but waiting for permission to step inside.‘ Say hello to your brothers and sisters,’ he had said, propelling her towards them. Katerina. On the window seat, Kate felt the silence of the house creep around her. Could there really be a message left for her in amongst the lines of verse, interspersed by the fantastical illustrations? She shivered, remembering the deep cold that had settled in her bones in her first terrified days at Arden House; and the feeling of absence–absence of familiar heat, of earth brittle with lack of moisture and yet rich with the scent of lemons and olive groves, rosemary and wild thyme. The absence, most of all, of love. The window rattled as a night breeze tore at the leaves turning towards their autumn brittleness and sent the rafters protesting in sympathy. Kate held the volume tighter, as the wind became the creaking of rigging in her mind, the frantic flapping ofa sail, the crash of waves againstthe hull of the boat taking her into the unknown. Then she was back there, in the terrace under the vines, her ears filled with childish screams–her screams–as she was dragged away, helpless, from the strong arms that loved her. The Secret Daughter of Venice. The paper is stiff and brittle with age as Kate unfolds it with trembling hands. She gasps at the pencil sketch of a rippling waterway, lined by tall buildings, curving towards the dome of a cathedral. She feels a connection deep in her heart.

Venice. England, 1941. When Kate Arden discovers a secret stash of drawings hidden in the pages of an old volume of poetry given to her as a baby, her breath catches. All her life, she has feltlike an outsider in her wealthy adoptive family, who refuse to answer any questions about her past. But the drawings spark a forgotten memory: a long journey by boat… warm arms that held her tight, and then let go.
Could these pictures unlock the secret of who she is? Why her mother left her? With war raging around the continent, she will brave everything to find out…
A gripping, emotional historical novel of love and art that will captivate fans of The Venice Sketch book, The Woman on the Bridge and The Nightingale.

About the Author

#Review by Lou of Bus Rhymes and Playtime By Sue Wickstead @JayJayBus @rararesources #blogtour #childrensbook #picturebook #songs #rhymes

Bus Rhymes and Playtimes
By Sue Wickstead

Today I have a review of a book that’s perfect for on the bus or for play. Check out the blurb and review below.

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Blurb

Bus Rhymes to sing along with.

Have you got your ticket ready?

Where will you go today?

Why not jump onboard the bus –

Come along to sing and play.

So take your seat as off we go.

What could happen along the way?

 Review

Hop on a bus! Where will you go today? Go on an adventure through song and rhyme with Bus Rhymes and Play Times. It’s so much fun for young children. There is a great selection of rhymes and songs, some my be more familiar than others, but all just as entertaining and interactive as the next.
Feast your eyes on the illustrations, they’re all there, big, bright and bold for all to see, just to enhance the experience.

The rhymes and songs are easy for children and adults alike to pick up and you can have fun with the illustrations in imaginative play and discussion.

Hop aboard and have fun today!

#Review of The Mystery of the Homeless Man By Gina Cheyne @gina_cheyne #Mystery #Homelessness @rararesources #SeeMSDetectiveStory #BankHolidayRead

The Mystery of the Homeless Man
By Gina Cheyne

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I am kicking of a Rachel’s Random Resources Tours blog tour with a review of The Mystery of The Homeless Man – A SeeMS Detective story.

 

Why would an airline pilot exchange a world of comfort 
for life on the streets?

In 2006, Miranda meets an itinerant in the wood, she takes him home. He refuses to stay, desperate to return to the streets. Miranda gives him some money and forgets the incident.
Fifteen years later, the SeeMs Detective Agency is investigating an abandoned house and discovers a homeless man was found there: murdered.
No one knows who the dead man is or how he died, and, with one hundred and fifty unidentified street deaths per year, no one has time to find out.
But, the SeeMs Detectives have both time and a client.
Their investigation takes them into a surprising world of aviation, night-clubs and the homeless.
What they discover threatens one of their team. Can they save their colleague before the homeless man’s killer strikes again?

Review 

This is an intriguing book as  homeless man gets killed and that could have been that because it’s easy for someone in that position to disappear and no one notice, however the SeeMS Detective Agency is on the case. Their colleague, later on also finds their life in danger. There’s quite a bit of trepidation and some twists. Within the book you see how the characters all fit together within the agency and become enthralled within their lives, as well as they mystery itself. The real intrigue happens when the detectives have to look back to the homeless man and find the connections to more present times.

This is the first of the books I have read in the series. There are 2 more, previous to this. This mystery appears to be fine to read as a standalone. I think if you like The First Ladies Detective Series, you’ll like this book. It has a similar genteelness in atmosphere and pace to it amongst the brutality of murder.