This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Jennifer Joyce
Hannah and her husband, Cliff, are spending two weeks in a villa in France with their son. Joining them are Hannah’s sister, Jill, and her daughter Aisha and Jill’s best friend, Tristan. Hannah wants to spend their holiday relaxing by the pool but tensions soon run high between Hannah and Cliff, and Hannah and Jill. And then, to make matters worse, Hannah and her family are contacted by someone from her past, someone who could destroy the family she has built up.
I quite enjoyed reading about Hannah and her family’s holiday as it was so full of drama, but I started to feel a bit cheated as the book plodded along. The tagline of the book is ‘If your first love came back to offer you everything you ever dreamed of, what would you do?’, which all sounds very intriguing until you get through two thirds of the book and the ‘first love’ still hasn’t turned up. It was all very nice hearing about Hannah’s holiday, but what about the plot? Those first two thirds of the book were slow, mostly charting their everyday lives of the holiday but didn’t seem to have any real purpose. It didn’t move the plot along, apart from the odd chapter explaining who the first love was. When he did eventually turn up, the plot stepped up a gear and I ploughed through the final 100 pages pretty quickly, but by then I’d already been put off by the unnecessarily drawn out 200 pages before it. As nice as it was getting to know Hannah and her family – apart from the frustratingly selfish Jill – most of what was contained prior to the man from Hannah’s past showing up was superfluous to the plot and only slowed the whole book down.
The quality of the writing was pretty good and it had a nice flow to it, so it was disappointing that the storyline was so slow and mostly filler until the main feature. I didn’t like the way a certain character changed so rapidly towards the end of the book, with none of what we learn fitting in with their character. It was like it was added in to make this character the villain of the piece.7/10