The Love Island Bookshop – Kate Frost

A Romantic Escape
5

A dream job, two handsome men, one destructive act. Will Freya’s opportunity of a lifetime end in tears? When Freya leaves her publishing job in London to be a barefoot bookseller in the Maldives, it’s the push she needs to move on from her sadness and reignite her passion for life. While resort owner Zander is charming, it’s handsome dive instructor Aaron who befriends her when she needs it most. But all is not what it seems and there’s trouble brewing in paradise. Taking a chance on happiness is harder than she imagined. Can Freya let go of her heartache and allow herself to fall in love again?

This book contains:

mentions of suicide
mentions of a car accident death
discusses the effect of death of a loved one on us.

Freya works in a publishing house in London but needs a change after some difficulties she’s experienced in the past few years. She’s emotionally lost and distressed but isn’t sure how to help herself. Even when she moves to the Maldives she struggles to come to grips with everything that’s happened in the past few years.

Aaron is a dive instructor at the resort Freya moves to. He’s handsome, charming, friendly and is there for Freya in ways people haven’t been recently.

Zander is the mysterious playboy who owns the resort and finds it exceptionally difficult to let anyone in, or release control of the bookshop he’s hired Freya to run.

After a difficult few years, Freya applies to be the love island barefoot bookseller on an exclusive Maldives resort island. She lands the job and moves across the globe from London to the Maldives where she instantly makes friends with a roommate, Drew, and handsome Aaron.

As her relationship with Aaron grows deeper, she finds herself learning more and more about the playboy millionaire Zander, and it’s nothing like she expected. He’s kind, considerate and slowly letting her be more involved in decisions about the bookshop, letting her live her dream of running a cosy bookshop in a dream location.

While I hate on the fact that I had to read about Freya travelling to the Maldives and how amazing it is (all because we had to postpone our own Maldives trip from last yr and we still can’t even visit another STATE!), I couldn’t help but fall in love with the descriptions of the islands. I can’t say how authentic they are, but I could picture them so clearly from Kate’s descriptions!

I forgot to read the blurb before going into this book so I felt for a while there that this couldn’t possibly be a romance. That was of course after the initial bit, but then there was so long where it felt like it wasn’t going to be that I was impressed, but also a little confused.

If I’d read the blurb I might not have had that confusion, but I don’t always make my reading experience easy!

The way Freya stood up for herself and didn’t jump to any conclusions along the way was admirable. Her integrity throughout the book was amazing and at a level I think a lot of people lack but should probably aim towards. In the end she gets an amazing happy ending that she definitely deserves!

Continue to read further down to find out about the author.

Author Bio

Kate Frost is the author of best-selling romantic escape novels (The Baobab Beach Retreat, A Starlit Summer, The Greek Heart and The Amsterdam Affair), character-driven women’s fiction (The Butterfly Storm series and Beneath the Apple Blossom), and Time Shifters, a time travel adventure trilogy for children. She has a MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University, where she also taught lifewriting to creative writing undergraduates.

Kate lives in Bristol with her husband, young son, and their Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Frodo. As well as writing novels, she’s also the Director of Storytale Festival, a new city-wide children’s book festival that she co-founded in Bristol in 2019 with the ethos of making books accessible to all and encouraging children and teens to read, write and be creative. Kate feels incredibly lucky to spend her days writing and being immersed in books.