Katie Fforde is in a small class of writers for me that include authors like Erica James and Marian Keyes. These are writers that I absolutely know that I can count on for that relaxing and entertaining read. the kind that I crave when life is difficult.
This time, readers meet Fran. She has worked as a chef in London but has always dreamed of living on a farm. Well, since this is fiction, her wish is granted. A distant relative has moved to assisted living and wants the farm and, most especially her cows, to remain in the family. All that Fran has to do is prove her worth…easy? Maybe not.
Aunt (by courtesy) Amy is tough and has expectations. She warns Fran away from Antony whom Amy thinks wants to buy her land. The problem is that Antony has been so very nice and helpful to Fran. Is he the good guy that he seems? Will there be the happy ending that Fforde generally gives to her readers.
Enjoy spending time with Fran, her herdsman and her close friend. Watch as she holds dinner parties and makes cheese, all in the hope of keeping the farm. Will she?
When you crave predictable but in the best possible way, read a Katie Fforde novel. You cannot go wrong.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Bookcouture for this title. All opinions are my own.
See reviews of some of this author’s books on my site. She has a new book coming out soon.Interesting in light of the leak from the U.S. Supreme CourtI have a friend who is urging me to read this one.
I very much enjoy this series of Sherlock Holmes titles for young readers. Each is a short chapter book with cartoonish illustrations. The stories are well and simply told while keeping that sense of wonder about the ways in Holmes is able to find clues and draw conclusions.
This book begins with a perfect example. Holmes explains how he knew that Watson was not going to make a particular investment. Young, future, detectives will surely be inspired.
The actual case begins with a drawing that looks like one made by a child. The figures in this drawing are the dancing men of the story’s title. The note is brought to Holmes by a gentleman who married a woman with a mysterious past. More and more drawings are found. What is going on? What is the reason for an escalation that ends with a death? Young readers will, I think, be eager to find out.
I confess that I have not read all of the Holmes stories so this was new to me. I enjoyed trying (unsuccessfully) to solve the case.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Arcturus publishing for this title. All opinions are my own.
I am so happy to be part of this book tour. This novel looks delightful and perfect for summer reading. Many thanks to Justine Sha and the publisher for this opportunity.
Stefanie London is a USA Today Bestselling author of contemporary romance. Her books have been called “genuinely entertaining and memorable” by Booklist, and her writing praised as “elegant, descriptive and delectable” by RT Magazine. Originally from Australia, she now lives in Toronto with her very own hero and is doing her best to travel the world. She frequently indulges her passions for lipstick, good coffee, books and anything zombie related.
Book Summary:
How do you start over when the biggest mistake of your life has more than one million views?
Forget diamonds; the internet is forever. Social media consultant Isla Thompson learned that lesson the hard way when she went viral for all the wrong reasons. A month later, Isla is still having nightmares about the moment she ruined a young starlet’s career and made herself the most unemployable influencer in Manhattan. But she doesn’t have the luxury of hiding away until she’s no longer “Instagram Poison.” Not when her fourteen-year-old sister, Dani, needs Isla to keep a roof over their heads. So she takes the first job she can get: caring for Camilla, a glossy-maned, foul-tempered hellhound.
After a week of ferrying Camilla from playdates to pet psychics, Isla starts to suspect that the dachshund’s bark is worse than her bite—just like her owner, Theo Garrison. Isla has spent her career working to make people likeable and here’s Theo—happy to hide behind his reputation as a brutish recluse. But Theo isn’t a brute—he’s sweet and funny, and Isla should not see him as anything but the man who signs her pay cheques. Because loving Theo would mean retreating to his world of secluded luxury, and Isla needs to show Dani that no matter the risk, dreams are always worth chasing.
Take a peek:
three
Isla trudged along the hallway toward her apartment, high heels swinging from her finger. Usually she wouldn’t dare go barefoot on public carpet—especially not in a building of questionable standards, like this one. But after walking six blocks to get home in the pretty, stiletto-heeled death traps, her feet had officially given up the ghost.
Besides, foot hygiene was the least of her problems. With another rejected job application—this one coming through before she’d even made it home from the interview—she had bigger things to worry about.
Isla unlocked her front door and stepped inside, her lips quirking at the familiar sight. Her little sister, Dani, was standing next to the wall, one hand resting on a makeshift barre crafted from a shower curtain rod and some wall brackets they’d found at the dollar store. She was dressed in a plain black leotard and a pair of pink ballet tights with a hole in the knee. Her battered pointe shoes were frayed around the toes, though the ribbons were glossy and new, stitched on with the utmost care.
Classical music blared from the stereo and Isla hit the pause button. “What have I said about disturbing the neighbors?”
Dani paused mid-plié. “If you’re going to do it, do it properly.”
“That’s not what I said.” She shot her sister a look, trying to ignore how her leotard was digging into her shoulders. It was clearly a size too small because the damn girl was growing like a weed. At fourteen, she’d already surpassed Isla in height.
“Oh, that’s right.” Dani grinned. “You said that about schoolwork. But, to be fair, ballet is even more important than schoolwork, so…”
“We’ll agree on that when you can pay the bills with pliés.” Isla hung her keys on the hook by the door and dumped her purse onto the kitchen counter.
“Working on it.” Dani continued warming up, her pointe shoes knocking against the floorboards. “How was your day?”
Ugh. You mean, how were the three dozen rejection letters and this last interview, which was clearly only for curiosity’s sake because the recruiter straight up laughed the second I left the interview room?
“It was…fine,” she said, without much commitment.
In reality, it was anything but fine. What had her old boss called her? Oh, that’s right: Instagram poison.
“You told me once that saying something is ‘fine’ is no better than saying it’s ‘purple pineapples.’” Dani dropped down from her relevé and frowned. “What happened?”
What hadn’t happened?
Isla pulled a bottle of wine out of the fridge and poured her-self a glass. She’d been rationing it, since the only stuff that was left after this was a box wine of unknown origin. “Amanda lost her contract with that makeup company and her movie is flopping. She sent me an angry email today.”
“Whatever happened to all publicity is good publicity?”
“It’s a myth. Turns out some things are career killers.” Isla took a gulp of the wine. “And now I’m that woman who filmed a Disney princess vomiting all over herself.”
After the live video had been splashed across the internet and featured on network television, Isla had swiftly been fired from her job as a senior social media consultant with the Gate-way Agency. All her freelance clients had dropped her like a hot potato, too. Now, anyone who searched Isla’s name got page after page of the same thing: vomit girl and the person who was too dumb to stop recording.
Hence the growing pile of rejected job applications.
“I take it the interview didn’t go well?”
Isla cringed at the concern in her sister’s voice. Most fourteen-year-olds were worrying about frivolous things, like which shade of lip gloss was the most on trend or how to craft the perfect TikTok dance routine. Hell, she would argue that’s the stuff they should be worrying about. Not whether they were going to have a roof over their heads.
“No, it didn’t,” Isla admitted. “But honestly, I’m not sure I would have wanted to work there anyway.”
It was a total lie.
Isla was ready to take anything at this point. It was humiliating to be begging for jobs she could have done ten years ago with her eyes closed, only to be rejected because the recruiters had found someone “with more experience.” Umm, what? In other words, she’d been officially blacklisted from the social media industry.
“How come?” Dani walked over to the kitchen, her arms swinging gracefully by her sides. Her dark hair was in a neat bun on top of her head, tied with a piece of leftover ribbon from her pointe shoes. “Were they not very nice?”
“Not really.”
Dani came up to Isla and put an arm around her, stooping so she could lean her head against her big sister’s shoulder. Some days it felt like it was them against the world. Given they didn’t actually know where their mother was these days—and they hadn’t seen either one of their dads in God only knew how long—they really did have to stick together.
Isla remembered the day it all happened—the eve of her twentieth birthday. Their mother had announced she was eloping overseas with a boyfriend she’d known less than a month, and they hadn’t seen her since. Apparently motherhood was a temporary commitment, in her eyes. That left Isla responsible for the well-being of another human, and more terrified of the future than she’d ever been.
Six years later, Isla had built a life for them both. She’d fostered and financed her half sister’s dreams, built up her own dream career and done it all while hiding how often the numbers weren’t in their favor. But the older Dani got, the more keenly she observed what was going on.
“Maybe you can ask the ballet school for our money back,” Dani suggested quietly.
Her spot had been secured for the summer intensive ballet camp months ago, before Isla’s job situation had fallen apart.
“I know it was really expensive,” she added.
Isla felt tears prick the backs of her eyes, but she refused to let her sister see even a sliver of her emotion. It was her job to be a pillar. To be the strong one. To be the positive mother figure neither of them ever had.
“Dani, I would sell my right kidney if it meant you could go to ballet camp.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”
Isla snorted and wrapped her sister into a big hug. Like al-ways, she smelled of oversweet vanilla perfume and mango-scented shampoo. She would do anything for this kid. Anything to make sure Dani grew up knowing that dreams were worth chasing, and that family came first no matter what.
“And how do you know so much about black market organ sales?” Isla raised a brow and Dani laughed.
“CSI.”
“Ah, of course.” She laughed. But when Dani pulled back, Isla noticed her sister’s characteristically carefree attitude was hidden under the worry swimming in her blue eyes. Isla hated seeing that. “Why don’t we go to Central Park, huh? We’ll take your phone and I can get a few shots of you for your Instagram account.”
“Really?” Dani’s eyes lit up.
“Sure. Just let me get changed.”
“I promise not to make you take a hundred photos this time.” Dani grinned and did a little pirouette in the kitchen. “Not even half that!”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Isla shot over her shoulder as she headed into her bedroom. “Trust me, I know where you get those perfectionistic tendencies.”
The second Isla closed her bedroom door behind her, she slumped against it and deflated like a balloon the day after a birthday party. Outside, the city roared with life. Sirens and horns, music blaring from the open window of another apartment, the shrieking laughter of people enjoying the early evening. She gazed out of the window, her eyes catching on the usual things that faced their cozy (read: cramped) place. There was a glimmer of light as the sun reflected off glass panes, and the zigzag of a fire escape from the building opposite them. The same three apartments always had their blinds wide open—either inviting voyeurism or not caring enough to prevent it.
Sometimes she wondered about their lives. Had they been stuck and struggling at some point like her? Had they lost faith in themselves and the world?
After she got fired, Isla had assumed it would all blow over if she kept a low profile and didn’t make matters worse. But then Amanda’s movie tanked and all her sponsorships fell through, and people stopped taking Isla’s calls. Even when she’d tried to laugh the whole thing off as a “Miley Cyrus exercise” her contacts had frozen harder than an Upper East Sider’s Botoxed face.
New York could be like that—when you were successful it felt as though the sun was made of gold. And when you fell from grace, you hit the concrete so hard you shattered every bone in your body.
How much longer was she going to be able to keep faking that everything would be fine? Rent was due next week and the final payment for Dani’s elite ballet camp had come out of her account a few days ago. Isla’s eyes had watered at the amount. But Dani had worked so hard, practicing every day and pushing herself to the limit to beat out the rich kids with their prestigious coaches and private lessons and their lifetimes of opportunity.
How could Isla pull the rug out from under Dani like that? What kind of lesson would that be teaching her?
“You’ll figure this out,” she said to herself. “Someone will hire you.”
After all, she had to make it work. Because letting her sister down was not an option.
1) I picked this book because of it’s title. It is a clever play on words similar to The Devil Wears Prada, which is one of my favorite novels. Have you read The Devil Wears Prada, and what made you use this play on words in the title and create a plot like this?
I haven’t read the book, but I do love the movie and have seen it many times. When I was pitching the Paws in the City series to my publisher, I told her I’d envisaged the first book being “a modern version of The Devil Wears Prada… except that Miranda Priestly was a sassy little dog” and that there would be a social media element and a hot hermit hero.
The book actually had a different title at this stage, and it was my editor’s suggestion to make it a twist on The Devil Wears Prada title because she thought it was such a fun idea, and why not really hammer the inspiration home? So we changed the title and the rest is history!
2) What was the most difficult part of writing the book and why?
Writing Theo’s darker emotional arc and his grief while trying to balance the expectations of a romantic comedy story (i.e. that it’s funny, lighthearted and uplifting) was something that required a lot of thought and refining. It’s a balance I always work really hard on, because as much as I love the laugh-out-loud elements of writing romcoms, I always strive to write a deeply emotional story and sometimes those two things can feel at odds. But I work closely with my editor to get the balance right and she always helps to reign me in if I go too far in either direction.
3) What’s your favorite scene in the book and why?
Oh that’s such a tough question! I love so many scenes in this book, that I could give you a different answer on any given day. The scene where Theo tries (and fails) to cook dinner for Isla is one I really enjoy, because I think we really see the hero in a vulnerable spot here and the way Isla reacts so kindly is a moment of bonding between them which really helped to move the romance to another level.
But also, I adore the scene with Theo and Camilla where she finds his grandmother’s old scarves. It made me cry every time I had to read it in edits. But really, any scene with Camilla is gold because she’s just so vibrant and adorable.
4) Who is your favorite character and why?
I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite. Sorry! I just love them all so much.
5) Is there a character who was difficult to create and why?
Writing Camilla was quite a challenge, as is any animal character that plays a major role in a story (and I have written several!) Partially this is because she doesn’t have her own POV or the ability to speak, so her “dialogue” and intent has to be interpreted by the human characters. In essence, the humans give Camilla her voice. I also wanted Camilla to have her own character arc and a relationship development with both the hero and the heroine, just like the human characters have with each other, which was something I haven’t done before.
In the end, I loved writing Camilla so much that we decided to have animal characters with their own strong voices front and center for each book in the series. It was a challenge, but one that was a load of fun.
6) What do you like to do when not writing?
So many things! My husband likes to joke that I’m the Queen of Hobbies. I knit, sew, bake, read, cook, make cocktails, practice Pilates, ride on my Peloton, collect perfume, play boardgames, video games and card games, travel, explore new restaurants… can you tell I can’t stand being bored?
The things that are really capturing my attention at the moment are playing Dying Light 2 with my husband, knitting sweaters and reading dark, twisty thrillers.
Readers who devoured Richard Osman’s two mysteries are pretty sure to enjoy The Marlow Murder Club. It has many similar good eccentricities while telling its own story.
As in Osman’s novels, our woman on the scene is a pensioner. Eccentric Judith Potts is in her seventies. She may be a little too fond of whisky. She sets crossword puzzles to earn money, lives in an inherited property and observes everything around her. She is also intrepid.
One night Judith hears a shot. Her neighbor Stefan is dead. It is quickly established that Stefan was murdered. His character is less clear; there are those who saw him as a good and kind man and others who did not. What was the nature of his association/relationship with an antiques business and Elliott, its proprietor? How, if at all, is Stefan’s death connected to another victim, a well-liked…
I know that I often list these novels but I do enjoy them!
This is part of a terrific series of mystery/suspense novels. Immigration plays a role. An American classicSeeing this has led me to finally start reading this mystery that has long been in my TBR pile.
This beautifully illustrated book does credit to Gaudi’s love of shape and his architecture. It tells the story of Guadi from his youth to his death in a straightforward manner. Young readers learn how Gaudi was unable to go to school because he could not walk freely for many years. During his early years, the young Gaudi spent time in nature and came to appreciate the forms that he saw there, especially curved lines.
Gaudi overcame his disability enough to enroll in university. When he graduated, it was thought that possibly he was a genius (or not). Gaudi became an architect with his own colorful, unique vision. His buildings, cathedral and parks are still popular attractions in Barcelona.
Budding architects may well take inspiration from this story of a man who did things his own way with vision and determination. He forever changed the face of Barcelona.
Many thanks to NetGalley and NorthSouth Books for this title. All opinions are my own.
A Novel of Nancy Mitford and the Pursuit of Happiness
by Eliza Knight
#TheMayfairBookshop #NetGalley
The Mitford family seem to be enjoying a renaissance on TV and in books. There was a recent miniseries with Lily James and, not long ago, I read both The Bookseller’s Secret and the latest entry in Jessica Fellows’ historical mystery series that features Nancy and her siblings.
For anyone who may not know, the Mitford daughters were fascinating and so different from each other. Diana left her husband, a Guinness heir, to be with the Fascist, Oswald Moseley. Unity was enamored of Hitler. Nancy was an author and there were also, Jessica and Deborah.
Happily I did not suffer from Mitford fatigue and I thoroughly enjoyed Eliza Knight’s novel. As is popular now, there are two timelines. In the present, Lucy is a book curator from Washington DC who is spending time in England. She is fascinated with the Heywood Hill bookshop where Nancy Mitford once worked. Lucy also has a connection to someone Nancy almost married.
Lucy is a huge Mitford fan. She possesses some Mitford letters and her mother, who is no longer alive, had a valuable edition of one of Nancy’s novels.
While in England, Lucy visits the Mitford home. This is beautifully described and made me long to see the real location. Lucy’s quest is to discern who the Iris in a dedication in one of Nancy’s novels is.
In the historical timeline, Hitler is on the horizon. As noted above, some of the sisters are not pro democracy. Nancy does attend a rally at Diana’s urging although she is clearly not a “Black Shirt.”
Readers get to know Nancy well. They vicariously see her pre-marriage lifestyle in the smart set. Readers watch Nancy in love with the ensuing disappointment, marriage and compromise. They also witness Nancy writing her novels, working at the bookstore and trying to support herself (husband Peter does not do well in the work world).
I very much enjoyed my time at The Mayfair Bookshop. I recommend this novel to those who enjoy historical novels and/or women’s fiction.
Many thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow/Custom House for this title. All opinions are my own.
Joyce's mystery and fiction book reviews with some non-fiction too! 