Raffaella Barker

This book reminded me of lazy summer evenings, sitting in the garden with friends and family, chatting about nothing of consequence into the smal hours and watching the sun rise again the next morning. It had the same sleepy quality to it, where things moved at their own pace and nothing was rushed.

I entered the Goodreads givewaway to win this book as I was interested in the way in which the strands of the story would mesh together. The two main locations in the book - Cornwall and Norfolk - are both places I am very familiar with and I thought the atmosphere and character of the two places was wonderfully portrayed. Again, it's the relaxed pace of life that is very endearing.

Unfortunately, the whole storyline has this kind of pace and pleasantness to it that didn't really give it much of an edge. There was no conflict, no crisis (other than that related to sheep or ice-cream), no unlikeable characters (everyone was pleasant and relaxed). One surprise at the end which, for me, failed to shock or alter the pace of the story.

The way the elements of the story merged together often felt forced. There were also a few unanswered questions - at the beginning of the story Michael made it clear he had to leave Cornwall, but never explained why (unless I missed this?), and his partner accepted this. It was as though the author was shying away from any negativity by making everything that happened absolutely fine. Another example of this was Kit and Luisa's first meeting, where, within minutes of meeting, Kit was feeling her clothing? In what way is this not creepy behaviour? I would've been out of there. But here, it was all fine.

The way in which the story was written was also slow-paced, and relied a lot on characters' reminiscences. There were so many passages devoted to characters recalling events from years past. It slowed the story to the point of nothing happening. If people are standing around thinking about times past, they aren't doing anything. There is no action. Even (potentially) the most active scene in the story, the party at the lighthouse, was told in recollections. This was disappointing, as I thought by this stage that we were getting somewhere. Some of the descriptions were very nicely written, but the main points I can recall now were to do with ice cream, a van and some sheep. The main point of the story got swamped by little details.

The dialogue was at times jumpy and difficult to read, with characters taking tangents that were at times irrelevant. There were also a few continuity issues that made the writing seem a bit sloppy in places.

A note on the book itself - I was quite concerned that, if this is the finished copy of the book, there were a distracting number of errors. These were mainly missing words but there were also some sentences that appeared to have at least two words in the wrong order. This definitely needed a final check-through before it was issued.

To conclude, I didn't completely dislike this book, it just wasn't the book for me. I like a bit more action involving at least one troubled character. This was all a bit too nice.

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