Welcome back everyone, after reading about Satan and the history of man I thought we could do with a change. So today’s review is going back to a romance novel.
Story Overview
Like with many a good romance novel we start some years in the past to set the scene of what our main character is going through. In this case Leah has just come home with her two year old baby to discover that her husband, her daughters father, has abandoned them and left them with a ridiculous amount of debt.
Fast forward 7 years and she’s finally managed to pay off all the debts, avoided the cottage being foreclosed on and feels like her life is finally on the up and up. In this case we come back to her right as she’s about to win an award for the best travel blog!
Because of this win she gets more offers to stay at hotels for free to review them on her blog. Personally, I think this is pretty cool, but at the same time so many people are doing this it’d be pretty hard to make a living off of blogging alone.
Not only did it surprise me that she can earn enough money from her blog to get by, I was also massively surprised that she gets over 1 thousand individual hits a day! I’m lucky if I can crack double digits when a new review goes up! That’s not to say I’m not grateful for all those who have followed me and so might be reading my reviews from their emails. I just have no idea how many of them are reading them.
Anyway! I digress! One of the offers Leah gets is to go to Athens for a few days. That in and of itself would be amazing for me. Some of the sites she visits are on my bucket list and the way Linn wrote about the places and described them made me feel like I was there.
When I see photo’s online I always think that they are photo-shopped or enhanced, but the way Linn described it really stuck into my imagination. Which meant I now have even more possible locations I didn’t know about on my list of places in Athens to visit!
While Leah is in Athens, she meets Daniel who is renting one of the villa’s she’s been asked to review and somehow, she ends up connecting with him both emotionally and physically.
After a second trip to Athens to see Daniel and get some more photo’s the drama really begins. And this time it involves Antonio(the ex-husband) and Daniel. I spent probably a good quarter of the book trying to figure out what could be happening, who Leah was going to end up with and what would happen to Rosie (the daughter).
My Thoughts
Needless to say, I found a number of surprises along the way, but I really enjoyed them.So much so that this morning when I was meant to start work, I decided to spend another 10 minutes reading while I ate my breakfast just, so I could finish the chapter where Leah and Antonio talk for the first time in over 7 years! I was hooked, and I needed to know what went down with that phone call.
The thing that irked me a little was that at the end of the last chapter it says “TheEnd” yet I knew from looking at the contents that there was an epilogue. It made me feel cheated a little, coz if I hadn’t have looked at the contents, I wouldn’t have known there was a little bit more. And that little bit more wraps it up beautifully! Why would you trick your readers into thinking there’s nothing else when you want them to finish the story? So when you read this one,make sure you read the epilogue after it says “The End”!
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this review, on Friday I will be reviewing Miao Shan: The Awakening by a new author Gary Morris.
Continue to read further down to find out about the author, see who else is reviewing this book and any extra giveaways available.
Author Bio
From interior designer to author, Linn B. Halton – who also writes under the pen name of Lucy Coleman – says ‘it’s been a fantastic journey!’
Linn is the bestselling author of more than a dozen novels and is excited to be writing for both Aria Fiction (Head of Zeus) and Harper Impulse (Harper Collins); she’s represented by Sara Keane of the Keane Kataria Literary Agency.
When she’s not writing, or spending time with the family, she’s either upcycling furniture or working in the garden.
Linn won the 2013 UK Festival of Romance: Innovation in Romantic Fiction award; her novels have been short-listed in the UK’s Festival of Romance and the eFestival of Words Book Awards.
Living in Coed Duon in the Welsh Valleys with her ‘rock’, Lawrence, and gorgeous Bengal cat Ziggy, she freely admits she’s an eternal romantic.
Linn is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and writes feel-good, uplifting novels about life, love and relationships.