When Claire Walsh is told by her husband, the morning she'd just delivered their baby, that he's met someone else and he's leaving her, she's understandably devastated. She ends up packing her things, and heading home to Ireland to the safety nest of her chaotic family home with her mam, dad and sisters. Healing her heart, and learning to look after her daughter on her own, Claire has a lot of strength to find.

I listened to this on audiobook and it was definitely an entertaining read. I've read one other Marian Keyes book before, one of her latest releases, but I've always wanted to start from the start and go from there and Watermelon is just an impressive debut book - especially knowing Marian's character and style of voice, and how it's developed over the years, it's amazing how she was able to have it come across so strong in her first book and make it very much hers.

I do think there's often a tendency in books of this time and nature to make the men in the story extremely stupid, and I don't think Watermelon was any different but the way gaslighting and manipulative relationships are portrayed in this book - before the term gaslighting was even really used a lot - were so interesting to see. I was practically screaming when Claire was allowing James to convince her everything was her fault.

I do think there were some iffy moments centered on Claire's body weight at the start and how she felt like she needed to lose weight very quickly (she'd literally just had a baby!), but thankfully it wasn't too bad. I'm looking forward to reading more books from the Walsh sisters and hopefully seeing how Claire is doing if she pops into them.