elouisedouglas's Reviews (721)

 I’ve been going through a process of uploading all my books into StoryGraph so I can use it to tell me what to read next, and I was shocked to realise that there were 3 Milly Johnson books on my shelf that I haven’t logged as read! I had to immediately rectify that, and this was the first one. 

As I was reading, it did feel quite familiar so I think I may have read this one when it came out 10 years ago before I was logging my books in Goodreads, but it was fabulous to re-read it again. 

The characters Ven, Roz, Olive and Frankie are written in such a way that you immediately feel like you could be best friends with them (which is typical for every Milly book I’ve read), and I absolutely love that. For me, it means I feel like I’ve been transported into the plot, like I’m there with them - and given that the location for this book is predominantly a cruise ship, that’s not a bad place to be transported. 

As is usual with a Milly novel, the characters are lovely well-rounded people, and their flaws are front and centre. But the friendships shine from the page - and I love how the friendships develop throughout this book - particularly between Roz and Frankie. 

All four characters are going through big things in their lives - Olive is stuck in a loveless marriage, acting as a carer for her hapless, lazy husband and his mother, working a cleaning job by day and looking after the whole household by night. She’s forgotten what it feels like to love. 

Roz comes across as a brashy confident person, but she’s been badly burned by her previous relationship and is risking losing the best man she’s ever known as she’s pushing him away. 

Roz also had a major falling out with Frankie which we don’t know all the details of, but Ven is determined that this holiday will get all four of them back on their feet again and back to the close-knit foursome that they were at school when they made all their dreams for the future together. And speaking of Ven - she’s hiding something. We’re not clued in on her secret so we don’t know what it is, which made for a glorious moment of discovery along with Ven’s friends. 

I loved how the characters progressed through the book, each taking a turn as front and centre so we can get to know them and become invested in their story - and I also loved the way that we kept getting glimpses into life back at home for them too - so we could see what they’d really been going through and how their families were doing without them. 

Full of drama, intrigue and of course romance, I absolutely loved this warm hug of a book. 

 I really really wanted to love this book. 

Focusing on a career criminal called Neil Adamson and the appalling events of one particular night in 1970 when two men (a nightwatchman and a police officer) ended up dead in the course of their work, it had two particular points of interest for me. 

Firstly, it’s set in Farsley which is just down the street from where I live. That alone would make me want to read, but more pertinently, my policeman Grandad was involved in the hunt for Neil after the murders took place. And not only that, but he had been stabbed previously by the same man, so it feels like a very personal story to me, and one that was already quite familiar. 

But I just couldn’t love the book unfortunately. It was clearly well researched and contained lots of personal details contributed by the families of the people involved in the story, but the writing style just felt a bit amateur for me - at times it read more like a good school report than a book. Sometimes I had to read a sentence a few times to get the proper meaning, and there were times when the structure of what was written just felt a bit jarring. Things like ‘at approximately ‘x time’, followed two sentences later by ‘two minutes later, at exactly x time’. It just broke my head a little bit. 

It definitely brought extra depth to the details of the story that I knew, and that personal touch from others involved was great and I loved seeing the pictures that had been included. It was a fast-paced read and I read it in two sittings because I had that personal investment - every time I saw my Grandad’s name in print it was like a little thrill. 

While the writing style wasn’t for me, that’s not necessarily to say it wouldn’t be perfect for someone else, so if you’d like a fast-paced piece of local history, I’d still recommend it as a good read to learn a little something. 

 Before picking up this book, I didn’t really know much about Amy Poehler other than that I loved her in Parks and Rec. But I’ve realised that my favourite kind of audiobooks are autobiographies, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to learn more about her. 

Turns out, she’s a pretty kick-ass woman. The book tells a lot about Amy growing up and how she got into comedy and became such an amazing actress. Narrated by the author, with a whole host of friends, it felt warm and lovely and I just loved that it felt a bit more ‘interactive’ than some audiobooks - tailored for an audio audience rather than just being the written book read out. 

The last chapter of the book was read to a live audience which brought another dimension to it too - not something I’ve had with an audiobook before, but you can see how Poehler thrives with an audience. 

As a British person, a lot of the things that Amy talked about were more vague references than things I knew in detail - for example I’ve obviously heard of Saturday Night Live (SNL), but when she was talking about specific sketches which I would imagine may be common knowledge to those on the other side of the pond, I didn’t really have the context I needed. I have a list of things I need to go look up on YouTube now I’ve finished reading! 

Part biography/memoir, part advice, I found the book so entertaining, but also so real. Amy doesn’t shy away from talking about the harder things, mistakes she’s made and difficult times in her life. She’s real, and the stories can be raw, but she’s unapologetically her and it’s so nice to see that human side to a celebrity memoir. 

I’m so glad I listened to this rather than read it, and I’d recommend you do too! 

 Ahhhhhhh Outlander. Even though these books are not my usual genre (historical fiction), I am finding such joy in them. 

After the cliffhanger at the end of the last book, there will definitely be spoilers here so stop reading if you don’t want to risk it! 

At the end of the last book, we see Claire go back through the stones to modern times - she’s pregnant with Jamie’s baby and it looks like the only way to keep her and the baby safe from the battle raging at Culloden. 

This book starts a couple of decades later. Brianna is an adult now and Claire and Brianna are back in Scotland. Claire assumed that Jamie had died at Culloden, but following some extensive research it becomes clear that he survived. 

All of a sudden, Claire’s life is flipped upside down. It’s obvious that she’s never been fully happy since she left Jamie and now that Brianna is grown, it seems like maybe she could go back. Could she leave her only daughter to return to the man she loved so deeply? 

Well, spoiler alert, she does. And it’s not entirely smooth sailing on her return. Jamie might be glad to have her back, but the welcome isn’t quite as friendly from some of Jamie’s family. And while Claire has been bringing up her daughter in the modern day, Jamie has been living too. He’s not the same as he was when Claire left. 

The book takes us on a grand adventure to foreign soil that made me quite jealous (apart from the deadly danger of course). Jamie and Claire are reunited and we see their relationship grow and change, but it still has elements of the same fire as it did before. 

The book is such an unusual blend of romance and history combined with action and suspense. There’s drama and there’s adventure, but with the romance that brings it all together and makes the book feel like a warm cosy hug, even when things are going all sorts of wrong. 

My only negative about this book was the derogatory references to small Chinese man that Jamie has somehow brought into his little gang. I don’t know if it was trying to reproduce the way they’d have talked about him in the historical context, or if it’s just because the book was written in the 90s before we were more aware of how we talked, but it made me feel quite uncomfortable to be honest. But that was my only real criticism. 

Of course, as would be expected for a series, we end the book on another cliffhanger which has made me so desperate to pick up book 4 (and I’ve already gone out and bought 5 and 6 ready). They’re hefty books at over a thousand pages each, but they don’t feel like heavy reading while you’re transported back in time and thousands of miles away. I can’t wait to see what happens next for Jamie and Claire.