Most of the time, my husband despairs at the books overflowing on the shelves and littering the coffee table, dining table, and many other surfaces in the house. He sighs when I struggle to walk past a book shop while we are out and about, and shakes his head if I don’t leave empty handed. So it was to my great surprise that, while doing the weekly shop, he had ventured down the middle aisle and spotted a novel for me and bought it! The Soulmate Equation by writing duo Christina Lauren, was what he chose. And he made a good choice. It was the perfect antidote to busy days. Set in San Diego, Jess Davis is a single mum and busy financial consultant who works out of a local cafe with her writer freind. Jess has little time for romance. She’s not really looking, but when would she have the time? Until a chance encounter with a cafe regular, Dr River Pena, leads her to her soulmate. Dr River is developing a new way of dating. He has devised a genetically-based algorithm which suggest that your soulmate can be found my matching DNA. Offering Jess and her friend a free trial, Jess’s DNA sample matches her with a higher compatibility score than the company has ever seen before. But does the science stand up? There was enough differentiation in this classic romance to keep it interesting. This would be a great beach read.

Having had a fun time in romance-land, I decided to stick with the genre for my next read, as well because I was still in need of some light distraction after some longer working hours.The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary was next to jump off my shelf. I’d picked up a second-hand copy after hearing the author interviewed on the Best Book Forward podcast, where authors are asked about their top five books, Desert Island Discs-style. They also discussed the author’s own books and I liked the sound of this one. And I really enjoyed it. Tiffy needs a place to live, cheap and fast. Leon works the night shift at a hospice and sleeps during the day and could use some extra cash to help a family predicament. One bed, two flatmates. And in principle the two would never meet. But post-it notes and kind gestures of making extra food for the other are all it takes to light a spark. I will look out for more of Beth O’Leary’s books and hope that each is as charming as this one was. Five stars for the charm factor.

When not thinking of books, I’m usually thinking about food or places to visit (often Italy) and after watching a gorgeous cooking/travel show by Sophie Grigson, documenting her move to Puglia, I had to buy her book A Curious Absence of Chickens. Part memoir, part recipe book, this transplanted me to southern Italy. I would love to spend an extended stay in Puglia and there was lots of inspiration in this to keep me going until I can make that happen. And this week, I learned that Sophie has another book coming out with more tales from Puglia so that’s already going on my TBR. If you know of anyone with a dog-friendly bolthole to rent for a month or two in Puglia, give me a shout!

Watch out for my upcoming review of Elizabeth Strout’s latest book. To catch up a little, I started at the beginning with My Name is Lucy Barton, a spare story of daughter and mother. Lucy has had an operation but there were complications and her stay in a New York hospital extends to several weeks. While her husband cares for their two young daughters, he calls upon Lucy’s mother to come and visit. Lucy’s mother has never visited Lucy in all the years she has lived in the city and ventures from her home in Amgash, in the Mid-West, braving a flight and a cab ride from the airport. As her mother sits in vigil in Lucy’s room, the two have their first, strained, conversation in years. The wonder of this book is how much is communicated in the unsaid. Although a short book (barely 200 pages) and mostly set within the confines of the hospital room, the story covers a number of relationships, childhood and trauma, the institution of marriage, as well as the exploration of self through writing. When a book leaves you thinking about it long after you have put it down, you know it has substance. This is one such book. Five stars from me.

Less thought-provoking but nonetheless memorable have been the books in The Thursday Murder Club series. Richard Osman’s fourth instalment was a Christmas gift last year and I have waited patiently to read it until I could also borrow it from the e-library. Why read it on screen when I have the paper copy? So that I can read it wherever I am night or day. When my hold came in, I was delighted to be able to get started. I read most of it through the paper book, hard back and heavy though it was. I would say I enjoyed it a little less than the preceding three. The characters are settled and there are few surprises, but there was more emotion and pathos in this one. The story begins with the murder of a friend of the TMC, and the unlikely mix of heroin distribution and antique dealing feature. There remained enough humour and intrigue to pull me through but I wonder where next with this series. Osman must have thought the same when he finished it as he is taking a break to introduce a new series with a father-in-law/daughter-in-law detective agency called We Solve Murders. I’m sure I will be putting that one on my Christmas list this year.

April also saw me attend my first in-person book club in about 10 years. Since my early 20s, conversations through books has been a gateway to finding my tribe. When I moved to Amsterdam nearly 20 years ago, a friend already living there instructed me to pick up two copies of the next book at the airport and took me along to her group. I made a close group of bookish and less bookish friends from that original group of six, so close that once the group broke up, I travelled to Chicago and Sydney to visit them. I didn’t quite get the same vibe from my new local group but there are still people to meet so perhaps I should give it another go. Until next month, book friends.

Debbie Johnson is an author that I have returned to for a guaranteed feelgood read. In her Comfort Food Café series, as you could imagine from the titles, each book treated you a warm hug in book form, and this series Starshine Cove, is heading in the same direction. This is the second book in the series.

Cally’s world has been upended just before Christmas. Her reclusive mum has got herself a life and moved from around the corner in Liverpool all the way up to Scotland with her new beau Kenneth. Disaster strikes at the hairdressers where Cally works when the ceiling caves in.  And her 18-year-old son Sam is going through his own troubles after being dumped. With nowhere better to be for Christmas, Cally impulsively drives south, to the little bay where she remembers having her last happy childhood holiday before her dad died, Starshine Cove.  

Stumbling into the local pub in the middle of a fairy and pirate party, Cally and Sam are welcomed inside and dragged into the festivities, and their holiday in Starshine Cove begins. We meet the cast of characters in the pub. There’s Jake the pub landlord, and Connie the owner of the café, and two adorable little girls and their dad, Archie, a rugged giant.

I give this book 3 stars.  All the ingredients are here in the book but somehow there is something missing from this book. The story makes for a gentle ride on the teacups rather a rollercoaster of drama and adventure. Starshine Cove brings a little bit of magic but for me, this book doesn’t sparkle like the Comfort Food Café ones.

“And though she be but little, she is fierce.” – Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

As I’ve been blogging and Instagramming, I’ve received a few requests from authors asking me to read and review their books. Until Nia Lucas, sent me a request, I hadn’t been minded to do this, my reading time being precious and I didn’t want to waste it on stories that weren’t my cup of tea. But there was something about her book “Love Punked” that piqued my interest.

Lucas’ style is irreverent and ballsy (chopsy, as she might put it). The humour immediately draws you in and you fall into the world of Erin Roberts, a pocket-rocket of a school girl, wrangling with the daily struggle to stay on the right side of embarrassment in front of classmates with better hair and the incessant teasing wit of adolescent boys. Fumbling her way through those days of underage clubbing and dalliances with lusty young men, an ill-fated horizontal encounter on a lounge chair leaves her pregnant. With twins. And no sign of the young man who replaced her cherry with a pair of little embryos.

Erin shows herself to be a gritty battler, a determined young mum, desperate to do the best for herself and her boys, supported by family and a handful of friends, including one of her oldest classmates, Gio. Overshadowed by Erin’s crush on another boy, Gio’s fondness for Erin is hidden from no one but Erin herself, until Gio steps up to be a brave man when Erin suddenly goes into labour.

With only a quarter of the novel gone at this point, the story could end here, with the tale of two young kids, loving one another and parenting together these two little babies. But no, Lucas has built an obstacle course of hurdles, hoops, walls, chasms, and barbed wire for Erin and Gio to navigate. The struggle for love is real.

I really enjoyed the acerbic dialogue and self-deprecating nature of Erin. She embodies her nickname “Ginger Feist” and, like a mother lion, will defend her cubs and her dear friends with ferocity. Set through mid-90s and into the millennium, Erin and friends are just a couple of years younger than me, and the cultural references cast me back to my own youth, the struggles of school and growing up fast. I wasn’t a teen mum, but there were a couple of girls in my school that got pregnant young but I doubt I would be able to contemplate that experience from their perspective. Erin’s spirit puts you firmly on her side and you will be cheering her on to find her happiness with this book.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read your book, Nia. You created a little whirlwind in Erin.

The book Love Punked by Nia Lucas is available for Kindle and as paperback, click here to buy.

“I don’t know about doing a sequel. I think you can retroactively damage a product by adding to it.” – Simon Pegg

I got very excited a few weeks ago. A girl at work has set up an office book group. I love a good book group but a book group of colleagues? I wondered if professionalism will get in the way of freedom of discussion. But I quickly put such thoughts aside and jumped in with two feet. The selected book was The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, a book I had seen on the tables in book shops but about which I had otherwise heard little. Amazon Prime delivered it the next day allowing me to launch right into it.

The story revolves around Don Tilman, a professor in an Australian university who has come to the realisation that his life would be better off shared with a woman, and after a series of ad hoc dates with less than successful outcomes, determines that a more scientific approach to the situation is required. Thus begins the Wife Project wherein Don devises a complex questionnaire to whittle down the candidates to the ideal match, on paper at least. In the midst of all of this, Rosie breezes into Don’s life. Science falls out of the window, though not without Don desperately clinging to his methodology and hypotheses.

Don, I quickly realised, was not a man at ease in the world outside of academia, and even the more social aspects of that proved challenging. His misreading, or more often his lack of reading, social cues tend to end up with farcical consequences.  Most of the laughs in the book (and there are many) are at Don’s expense. It would be quite easy to attribute Don’s behaviour to that of someone having tendencies towards autism or Asperger’s. Not usually something to laugh about, but the book at least allows you to see the world through those eyes for a while.

The Rosie Project is compelling and I rapidly raced to the end, hoping that Don would find the woman that he was searching for. But the end of the book was already a launchpad for the sequel, The Rosie Effect.  To go in to detail on the sequel would spoil the first book, but there is a clue in the title! Again, I cantered through the second book at the same speed as the first book, enjoying it certainly, but there did begin to creep in a sort of exhaustion with the frenetic narrative and at times I wondered whether there was actually any character development or real progression to warrant the existence of the sequel. If there is ever a third book, I don’t think I would feel it necessary to re-engage with Don and his quirks.

While seeing the world from Don’s position, I was reminded of another book that I recently read about putting yourself in the shoes of someone who is dealing with the world in their own way. Wonder by R.J. Pallacio is about Auggie, an 8 year old boy like any other, apart from his congenital facial disfigurement.  Seeing the world through his eyes, and those around him, made me think about my own reaction when I see someone with a disability or a disfigurement, whether I look through them as though they are not there, do not exist, or whether I look and quickly look away, from politeness or horror or embarrassment, or from wanting to save their embarrassment, or whether I look, acknowledge and smile at them, whether that smile is taken as kindness or whether that is seen as pity.  I not sure myself what my glance would be intended to mean.