Laura

I have a mixed relationship with Liane Moriarty, I've read 4 of her books now (including this one) and I find that it's a bit of a love/hate situation, to be honest. I had recently read Big Little Lies, in order to ensure that I'd read the book before I viewed the TV series, and I loved it. I had high hopes, therefore, going into Truly Madly Guilty and was keen for more of the same.

This book is centered around a family barbeque which is attended by 3 couples and their families and the event that takes place at that barbeque will change everyone's lives forever. The book narrative is written from the perspective of events following the barbeque and also on the fateful day itself. We also are given perspectives from each of the different people who attended the barbeque that day and each of their recollections help to build up to the revelation of what went on that day.

Liane Moriarty books have become synonymous with this type of storytelling, they always have a mystery at their heart and focus on the relationships between the characters and how the events of the book have impacted their lives and Truly Madly Guilty falls into this format nicely. In the case of this book, we follow best friends Clementine and Erika and their husbands and the neighbours of Erika, who hosted the fateful barbeque that day.

This was where my main issue with this book arose and that is that none of the characters in this book had particularly redeeming qualities about them, aside from Erika's husband Oliver who was a stand out good guy throughout and a thoroughly decent human being. Everyone else seemed to be thoroughly self-involved and harboured terrible communication issues. Erika, for example, is somewhat of a control freak. Having grown up the daughter of an extreme hoarder she has latched onto Clementine and her family as a safe haven from her manic home life. From childhood she has longed for stability and as a result, she is a somewhat inflexible and judgmental character.

Clementine, on the other hand, didn't fare any better as a character from my perspective. A musician with 2 young children she is focused wholeheartedly upon an upcoming audition with a prestigious Sydney orchestra. She seems unhappy with her role as a mother and often hands over care for the children to her husband, Sam, whilst she focuses upon preparing for her big audition. Her parenting style is relaxed and she is instead driven by her art. She has been friends with Erika from childhood but we learn in the book that she has always felt Erika was forced upon her by her mother, who felt sorry for Erika, and therefore she feels resentful that she has missed out on other friendships she could have formed and instead had to spare the feelings of her poor friend with the crazy mother.

The mystery, or events at the barbeque, that form the central plot of this book are revealed approximately half way through the book although all of the clues and if, like me, you are good at second guessing it will probably not entirely shock you. I knew from probably 3 or 4 chapters before where it was going and therefore I felt a little let down that there wasn't more to it. I also began to wonder that if we were only 50% of the way through then where on earth was the other 50% going to take us.

This meant that once I reached the big reveal I found the second half of the book a little slower. It became very much about the feeling and impact the events of the barbeque had upon each of the characters, the guilt that they all carried and how it began to eat up their lives and become something they couldn't move past, hence the book's title Truly Madly Guilty.

I liked this book but was disappointed after the amazing Big Little Lies, Moriarty had raised the bar with that novel and on this occasion, she failed to live up to that expectation. This wasn't a bad book it just failed to evoke as much sympathy for its characters as it's predecessor and nor did it make me want to spend any further time with them, such as was the case with Madeleine, Celeste and Jane from Big Little Lies.

I think this may be my first two-star review this year, things had been going so well with my reading and then along came The Pool House to throw a spanner in the works and send me careening towards a reading slump. I should have known, I have become a fantasy girl at heart, avoiding contemporary fiction unless it comes with strong reviews but it was 20p in my local library book sale and I was drawn in by the cover.

Initially, it seemed this could be a good read, a story of Jem and her husband who take a share in a beach house in the Hamptons but when they get there they find out about a girl who drowned in the pool of the house a year before and died. Jem begins to investigate Alice's death and it incorporates all the inhabitants of the house. It should have been a fairly good read. So where did it all go wrong?

Firstly, in order to engage with the book, you need to really care about the character who has met their untimely demise. Alice, however, was ultimately really unlikeable. I could respect the fact she had come from a poor and difficult background and had overcome diversity but if you stripped that away she isn't a great person. She's shallow and motivated purely by status, she's a serial cheater moving from affair to affair behind her husbands back, she's prepared to blackmail her ‘friends' in order to get herself out of her own blackmail situation. I just couldn't get on board with her at all. I didn't empathise with her and so I really couldn't care about who killed her or why.

Jem, on the other side, was a much more rounded character to read from the perspective of and I liked how she portrayed the opposite of Alice, not really being on board with the expense of the beach house, having doubts about her own husbands fidelity and wanting to do the right thing by following up on what happened to Alice. It's just a real shame her parts of the book were at times slow and lacking in action. Overall this book felt unwieldy and by 330 pages in I couldn't do it anymore. I was losing the will to care and so I flicked to just before the end for a quick who-done-it reveal, found it didn't surprise me, it was what I guessed and so I gave up and am now moving on.

Disappointed with this one, it had lots of story potential but the characterisations let it down.

In the past few years, I've read only a handful of contemporary romance novels. Instead, I've focused upon Fantasy and Thriller books thinking that I'd lost my vibe with the contemporary romance offering on the bookshelves. When I heard about Beth O'Leary's debut novel, The Flatshare, something just spoke to me about the storyline and I decided I'd give it a try.

The Flatshare is the story of Tiffy and Leon, two twenty-somethings who share a flat. The catch is they've never met. Tiffy has the flat at nights and weekends whilst Leon is at work and Leon uses it during the 9-6 weekday whilst Tiffy is at work. It's an arrangement that suits them both. Slowly but surely though they begin to build a relationship via the little notes they leave each other around the flat and that relationship blossoms into friendship and the hint of something more.

Yes, this book is exactly what you would expect, it's a contemporary romance after all. We know we are all meant to be rooting for Tiffy and Leon to get together and we have all the normal trappings of hiccups along the way and well-meaning friends trying to give them advice and it should be quite a run of the mill story but somehow I fell head over heels in love with the characters in this book and gave it what has become a very rare rating of 5 stars.

Firstly I loved how well rounded our characters of Tiffy and Leon are, I liked how Leon had such a complex job in a palliative care home, helping those with a terminal illness, this lent some lovely side characters and stories that gave some really touching emotional moments in this book. Also loved how O'Leary wound in the story of Leon's brother Richie, incarcerated for a crime he swears he didn't commit.

Also, this book was great at looking at the long-lasting impact and dangers of an emotionally abusive relationship and the behaviours of gaslighting and coercive control. It gives a really thought-provoking side to what could have been a light fluffy throwaway romance. It was great to follow Tiffy through her journey and see her growth as a character.

For a debut novel, I thought this was really well written, hugely emotional and really gripping. I couldn't stop reading. It's full of short-snappy chapters flicking between Tiffy and Leon's perspectives and makes it really easy to lose a few hours to this novel without realising it and if you aren't careful you could find yourself reading it all in one sitting. A great summer read and a fantastic first novel from O'Leary.

I've been reading A LOT of fantasy this year, full on epic fantasies that are often really lengthy and in-depth and after finishing the mammoth that is The Priory of the Orange Tree I felt the need for a little break, a little bit of contemporary and so I picked up Beartown by Fredrik Backman.

I have heard nothing but amazing things about Backman's books and have been promising myself to get to them but when I saw this on the library shelf I couldn't stop myself from picking it up. I knew a little about its plot, that it was about a hockey-mad small town in the middle of nowhere where a young girl accuses the town's hockey star of rape and the fall out around the events as the town takes sides.

This book was hiding something much more between its pages though, I quickly fell in love with this book because what I found Backman did so well was to be able to introduce a whole myriad of characters from Beartown and make us care about all of them, whether they were a central character or one of those on the periphery. Each and every person lets us into their world and tells us about their world in Beartown and what it means to them and this makes for a powerfully emotional story that feels multi-dimensional and full of amazing relationships.

Through lots of hockey analogies and coaching techniques, we delve into whether or not the town and the hockey team might be to blame for what has happened, whether they have raised the team in the town to believe they are untouchable. We also explore the divide between how boys are treated by the community versus the girls. It's a highly volatile story and one that will prick at the conscience.

I haven't read much contemporary at all over the past year or so, I could count on one hand the number of books of this genre as often I haven't enjoyed them as much but I loved Beartown. I really enjoyed the beautiful writing of Backman and I am now desperately awaiting arrival at my library of the second Beartown book in the series, Us Against You which will allow me a chance to spend more time with all the wonderful residents of this small town.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough and it stands out as one of my favourite books of 2019 so far.

Rachel Hore has always been an author whose books I return to occassionally but enjoy immensely when I do and although I'd had her ‘A Week In Paris' on my kindle for a while I was looking forward to delving in.

There are many books now which follow Hore's preferred format, the split time period story whereby a present day mystery is linked to events of the past and the story spins between the two time periods unravelling the links and sharing it's secrets. A Week In Paris is again set within this storyline and follows Fay Knox, an accomplished violinist who has since a school trip to Paris had the sense that she remembers time spent in the city during his early childhood during the second world war. After her mother tries to take her life and learning of a week long trip to Paris with the orchestra she plays with she is directed to a convent in the city by her mother and told that they will be able to tell her about the secrets her mother never could.

Arriving in Paris Fay meets the mysterious Mme. Raymond who begins to tell her all about how her mother and father, Kitty and Eugine, met before the war and how her father's role as a doctor found them remaining in Paris during it's occupation by the Nazi troops. Fay is under the impression she had never been in Paris and believes her father died in a bombing raid in London during the war so she is intrigued and confused to learn about the risk they were at and the truth about the death of her father.

This is a wonderful story, the chapters during the occupation of Paris are incredibly moving, the way Hore tells Kitty's story and the creeping onset of danger to their lives was brilliant to read. The mystery of the story lies in not only what happened to Eugine but also in whether the storyteller Mme. Raymond can be trusted in the tale she tells and in how she came to know Kitty at all. In honesty the chapters regarding Fay's time in present day Paris were really just filler chapters to the main event for me, I read them because they held some interesting information but I kept willing the writer to get back to the war years with Kitty and for the story to continue to unfold.

As I said there are many writers now following this writing format of a split story of modern day and historic writing and whilst I truly do enjoy the books it's rare that I find myself as hooked by the present day chapters as I do by the mysteries of the past and this remained the case with A Week In Paris.

An excellent book, well written with lots of emotion and drama to keep you turning those pages.