Today I am sharing my review for A Wedding at the Comfort Food Cafe by Debbie Johnson. This is the sixth and final installment in the Comfort Food Cafe series, which I have enjoyed immensely:

Title: A Wedding at the Comfort Food Cafe 

Author: Debbie Johnson

Published: March 7th 2019 by HarperImpulse

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: Wedding bells ring out in Budbury as the Comfort Food Café and its cosy community of regulars are gearing up for a big celebration…

But Auburn Longville doesn’t have time for that! Between caring for her poorly mum, moving in with her sister and running the local pharmacy, life is busy enough – and it’s about to get busier. Chaos arrives in the form of a figure from her past putting her quaint village life and new relationship with gorgeous Finn Jensen in jeopardy. It’s time for Auburn to face up to some life changing decisions.

Settle in for a slice of wedding cake at the Comfort Food Café – a place where friendships are made for life and nobody ever wants to leave.

Review: I love the Comfort Food Café. I've completely fallen in love with this series, its characters and of course, the cosy setting. Although I am sad that this is the last installment in the series, I think it was the right decision from the author, to end on a high note. Through the series, we have read about 6 amazing women, I have cheered for them and I have shared their joy at finding their own happy endings, and they will for sure keep a little piece of my heart.

But let's talk about this story now. It focuses on Auburn, who moved to Budbury a few month ago to help her sister Willow care for their mother. We don't know much about her, other than she has quite a wild past. I was really curious to find out more about her before Budbury, especially as quite a big secret is revealed quite early in the story. 

This soon creates a lot of problems in her life and affects her new relationship. As we got to know more about this secret, I really had no idea how her story was going to end, as not everything was as black and white as it first looked like. And although I didn't always think that Auburn made the best choices, I liked that she was aware of her faults and always tried to be honest with everyone.

But my favourite part of the story was the wedding (and all the preparations leading up to it) of two of my favorite characters in the series, it was a great example of how lovely and supportive this community is and how they are aways ready to help each other. I loved catching up with all the regular characters. It was the perfect end to a gorgeous series. The Comfort Food Cafe might not be a real location but it has become a haven to escape to for a few hours, where there's always good food and lovely people. 

Rating: 4.5 stars

I would like to thank the publisher for sending me a copy of this book via NetGalley. This is my honest opinion.

Today I am reviewing Historical Fiction author Clare Harvey's new book, The Escape, a compelling wartime drama for fans of Lucinda Riley, Rachel Hore and Katherine Webb.

Title: The Escape 

Author: Clare Harvey

Published: January 24th 2018 by Simon & Schuster

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: Detta works as a translator for a Nazi-run labour camp for French workers. One winter morning in early 1945, Detta passes a group of exhausted British prisoners of war who are being force-marched westwards. The following day she receives an urgent message to contact the local priest. He is harbouring a group of escaped British prisoners of war in the manse: can she help? 

London, 1989. Miranda is a 19-year old photography student in London, in thrall to her older boyfriend, a journalist called Quill. In November the fall of the Berlin Wall is all over the news. Quill asks Miranda to come with him to Germany: before they leave, Miranda's grandmother gives her an old postcard of the village she was born in. Miranda hopes that working together in Berlin will help cement the cracks in her relationship with Quill, but one night his behaviour spills over into violence, and Miranda ends up fleeing through the rubble of the Berlin wall and into the East. As she travels further, she begins to suspect she’s being followed by the Stasi. If she goes on, she worries that she’ll be taken into custody and be accused of spying; if she turns back, it means returning to Quill.

At last her grandmother’s photograph offers the solution. She tells people that she is going to find her family in the East. The Catholic church, and the manse, opposite where her grandmother once lived, are still standing. And the secrets of the past begin to be revealed.

Review: this story already captured me on the first chapter: it's January in 1945, Detta works in a town in East Germany and when she hears that the Russian army are really close to them, she takes the train early to try to get home with her mother. I found the scene in that train such a strong opening, you could clearly sense what everyone was thinking and it set the tone for story perfectly, especially as you could see the type of person Detta was. 

We then followed her in her own hometown and witnessed how her life became a lot more complicated after meeting two escaped British pilots. I was really curious to see how the story would go from there, and how, or even whether, they would manage to overcome all the impossible obstacles and escape. 

We also had another storyline set in 1989: a young photography student, Miranda, is in Berlin, ready to witness the fall of the wall and capture the perfect image. I found this story fascinating, reading how people reacted to the fall and how their life changed from one day to the other. But I especially enjoyed discovering how the two storylines intertwined. 

I have to say that at the beginning of the book, I was more intrigued about Etta but as we followed Miranda in Berlin, I started wanting to know more about her. There were some really tense moments that had me glued to its pages and there were also plenty of turns and twists that I was not expecting at all. 

The Escape is definitely a very thought provoking and engrossing story. It combines very well the telling of those dark war times with scenes of hope and love. I enjoyed learning more about both timelines and was fascinated about all the details that Clare Harvey included, from a forgotten necklace to an old camera, they all had their small roles in the story. 

Rating: 4 stars

I would like to thank the publisher for sending me a copy of this book. This is my honest opinion.

From the bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost Things and The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes - a novel of mothers and daughters, families and secrets and the astonishing power of friendship.

Title: Queenie Malone's Paradise Hotel

Author: Ruth Hogan

Published: February 7th 2019 by Two Roads

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: Tilly was a bright, outgoing little girl who liked playing with ghosts and matches. 

She loved fizzy drinks, swear words, fish fingers and Catholic churches, but most of all she loved living in Brighton in Queenie Malone's magnificent Paradise Hotel with its endearing and loving family of misfits - staff and guests alike.

But Tilly's childhood was shattered when her mother sent her away from the only home she'd ever loved to boarding school with little explanation and no warning.

Now, Tilda has grown into an independent woman still damaged by her mother's unaccountable cruelty. Wary of people, her only friend is her dog, Eli. But when her mother dies, Tilda goes back to Brighton and with the help of her beloved Queenie sets about unravelling the mystery of her exile from The Paradise Hotel and discovers that her mother was not the woman she thought she knew at all...

Mothers and daughters... their story can be complicated... it can also turn out to have a happy ending.

Review: With Queenie's Malone's Paradise Hotel, Ruth Hogan is back with her gentle style and her complex and intriguing characters. This story is narrated by Tilda but in two different times, when she was a child (Tilly) and first moved to Brighton with her mom and now, already an adult, when she goes back to Brighton after her mom's death. Both storylines alternate, so little by little, you get to know what happened back then and how it affected her current life. 

I found this structure very intriguing and enjoyable to read. Young Tilly was a very interesting character and I liked how inquisitive and naive at the same time she was. She liked eavesdropping adult conversations and drawing her own conclusions which made me think a lot about how easy it is to misunderstand a situation or someone. 

Tilda as an adult was a lot warier of people and not interested in really living, just surviving. I couldn't figure her out at the beginning but as I found out more and more about her I got to understand her better. 

I enjoyed the most the scenes set in the hotel when Tilly was a kid as the cast of characters living at the hotel were great, especially Queenie. But there were a few moments in Tilda's adult timeline that really touched me. 

This story is both sad and heart-warming and Ruth Hogan has created another beautiful and inspiring tale that centers on friendship, family and mental health and reminds us how important it is to talk to each other. 

Today I am delighted to welcome author Clare Harvey to the blog. Her new book The Escape was published last week and to celebrate it, she' visiting several blogs on a wonderful Blog Tour. Today is my stop and Clare is talking about her forever books:

My Forever Books by Clare Harvey

Long before Marie Kondo started telling us all to only keep items that ‘spark joy’, I was happy to donate piles of old books to schools, friends or charity shops; I’m a book lover, but not a book hoarder. I suppose it’s a legacy of 17 years married to a soldier; the army posted us to a new home every two years or so, and I always de-cluttered each move. However, each time we did get a posting order and I began to think about having a clear out, there were always some books I found I just could not part with. These are my ‘forever books’, the ones that hold too many memories to part with – the ones that I’d tell Marie say “ching” when I see them:

The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr:

Before I could read myself, this is the book that had me enthralled. I’m the youngest child, so I was still at home with my mum when my elder sisters went to school. We lived in Devon at the time. I would sit on Mum’s knee, at the kitchen table after lunch, and this is one of the books I can remember her reading to me. I can also remember that we had a somewhat wayward collie dog called Scamper who used to get jealous. By the end of the story Scamper was usually sitting on Mum’s knee and I was on the floor (Mum carried on with the story, regardless)! I read this to my own children when they were small, too.

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder:

When I’d just turned seven we moved from Devon to Mauritius, due to my dad’s job. I’d not long learned to read properly, but because we had no TV out there I read, lots, and soon became a total bookworm (as the photo shows). I read all the Little House on the Prairie series of books, many times over, and fell in love Laura Ingalls Wilder as an author and as the heroine of the stories. Looking back, what’s interesting is that these books aren’t fiction, they are memoir: a blend of personal history and story telling. And the kind of writing I love to do most is where real-life events are melded with fiction. So perhaps my writing career really began with reading the Little House on the Prairie all those years ago.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin:

When I was 12 I was sent to a state boarding school (a comprehensive school that had a boarding ‘hostel’ attached) in Devon. My mum bought me this copy of Pride and Prejudice before I went, and I remember her saying she thought I was ‘old enough’ for Austen. I tried – but failed – to read it. I think the language was just a little too impenetrable for a 12-year-old and I didn’t get around to reading, and loving, this book until I was a few years older. Nevertheless, this copy of Pride & Prejudice stayed on my bedside locker in the dormitory throughout my first traumatic year at school, a constant reminder of my mum, and of home. And when I look inside the cover I can see the bookplate that I stuck there as a homesick pre-teen, with its picture of a unicorn and my curly over-practised signature in pencil. It’s a poignant reminder of my bookish pre-teen self. 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

Looking at the date inside the cover of this I can see that I bought it as an 18th birthday present to myself. And if you’ve ever read any Sylvia Plath this tells you all you need to know about the angst-ridden teen I was at the time. It’s tempting to look back on my teens and twenties and yearn for those sun-kissed, cellulite-free days, but this book reminds me that what was slender and sunny on the outside, hid a dark and conflicting muddle underneath. In 1988, as well as devouring Sylvia Plath and writing some very bad poetry, I failed miserably to get a place at Oxford University, and enrolled on a foundation course at Exeter College of Art and Design. There was quite a lot of navel gazing and scribbling in notebooks going on – I’m not sure I was any fun to be around, but I do still have a few friends from that era, so perhaps I wasn’t as much of a killjoy as I recall…

Summer with Monika by Roger McGough:

Boyfriends, eh? In my early twenties I fell totally and obsessively in love with someone, in the way that you do at that age. Falling for him was like coming down with the flu. We bought this book in Waterstone's in Exeter, and read it together. I thought our relationship was destined to be chapter four (‘our love will be an epic film, with dancing songs and laughter, the kind in which the lovers meet, and live happy ever after…’), but I should really have focussed more on the latter sections of McGough’s wonderful poem-story, such as chapter 39 (‘I wanted my pie in the sky, but you gave it me in the face’). Still, to paraphrase the wise and talented Joanna Trollope, you can’t be a writer until you’ve been knocked about a bit by life – otherwise you have nothing to write about – so even doomed relationships with manipulative men are never wasted, if you’re an author. Summer with Monika helped me form the back-story for the character of Miranda in my new book, The Escape, and eagle-eyed readers might notice a phrase or two from the poem appearing in her timeline.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde:

After graduating from university I lived with the pie-in-the-face boyfriend (see number 5) for a while. An old friend of his was on leave from the army one Christmas time, and had come to visit. On Christmas morning pie-in-the-face and I were going off to visit our respective families for Christmas Day, but the army mate said he wasn’t going anywhere and intended to spend the day eating takeaway pizza and drinking beer in front of the telly. When I asked why he wasn’t going home to see his own family, he told me that his mother had died a couple of years previously and he couldn’t face spending Christmas Day with his father and new stepmother. Feeling sorry for him, I gave him a present of a wrapped copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray (originally meant for pie-in-the-face, even though I knew he wouldn’t appreciate it). Instead of watching telly all day, the army bloke read Oscar Wilde, and enthused about the book when I saw him again after Christmas. And you know what? Reader, I married him (six years later). We have just celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary.

Into Enemy Arms: the remarkable true story of a German girl’s struggle against Nazism and her daring escape with the Allied airman she loved.

I couldn’t do this list without including this fascinating book, which provided the stepping-off point for the character of Detta in The Escape. Anyone who’s read it will know how much I’m indebted to Michael Hingston’s moving memoir of his aunt’s experiences in wartime Germany. It’s the latest ‘forever book’ on my shelves, but I’m sure it won’t be the last…

The Escape is out now in paperback, e-book and Audible.

You can catch up with Clare here: 

Facebook: @clareharvey13

Twitter: @ClareHarveyauth

Instagram: @clareharvey13

Website: clareharvey.net

About the Book:

Title: The Escape

Author: Clare Harvey

Published: January 24th 2019 by Simon & Schuster

Amazon | Amazon UK

They left four children safe upstairs.

They came back to three.

Today I am sharing my review for Candice Fox's new book, Gone by Midnight. This is the third book in her Crimson Lake series but it was published last week, in ebook and hardback. Here are my thoughts on it:

Title: Gone by Midnight (Crimson Lake #3)

Author: Candice Fox

Published: January 24th 2018 by Century

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: On the fifth floor of the White Caps Hotel, four young boys are left alone while their parents dine downstairs.

But when one of the parents checks on the children at midnight, they discover one of them is missing.

The boys swear they stayed in their room. CCTV confirms that none of them left the building. No trace of the child is found.

Now the hunt is on to find him, before it’s too late – and before the search for a boy becomes a search for a body... 

Review: this novel instantly captured my attention. Although it is the third book featuring main characters Ted Conkaffey and Amanda Pharrell, the story is completely independent and can be read as a stand alone, as I did. It gives you enough background on these two characters, for you to understand them pretty quickly. I am actually pretty curious now to know more about them, so I would like read the previous two books.

The story focuses on the disappearance of a boy. He was left, together with his 3 friends, in a hotel room while their parents had dinner in a restaurant close by. I was really curious to find out what had happened with the boy and I really enjoyed following the little hints that the detectives discovered. I have to say though that the author came up with several unexpected and shocking turns. There was definitely a lot going on and I was glued to the pages of the book for several hours, wanting to know more. 

I think this story combines really well a fast-paced and action filled narrative with a very human side and touching moments. Ted and Amanda are very interesting characters and it was very enjoyable getting to know them and their private life. 

Although this is my first book by Candice Fox, I can assure you that it won't be my last. I found her style very gripping and I am looking forward now uncovering more of her mysteries. 

Rating: 4 stars

I would like to thank the publisher for sending me a copy of this book. This is my honest opinion.