Jenni from the book

Me again so soon? Well having been on a holiday with not much else to do but swim, sunbathe and read, I unsurprisingly got through 4 books in a week (2 of them only took me a day). So once again it's review time - insert the usual spoiler alert here.

This book was a present from my work team for my birthday and when I read the blurb it didn't seem to give too much away. It's about 29 year old Luna, who's mother has just killed herself and left the ownership of her old house in Brooklyn to Luna and her recovering-addict sister Pea. As if all that wasn't enough to deal with, her mother left the girls a number of video tapes, to explain things in her own way. The first reveals that Luna's dad is not her biological father. And what's worse is that Luna fears she's going mad with vivid visions, hearing voices and seeing things that aren't there. Luna and Pea set off to Brooklyn to finally sell the house her mother fled when she was 20 years old, to go to england to be with their dad. The next of their mothers videos reveals what I had already guessed - the night she left Brooklyn, she was raped by someone she knew and killed him in self defense, unknowingly impregnated with Luna. But it turns out that Luna is not going crazy or losing her mind; she has started to step through time. As a physicist, Luna is in disbelief, until she meets her 20 year old mother a week before she is set to be attacked, the act which set her life on the path to suicide (as a strict catholic, she never got over what had happened or what she had done). As she continues to step between the two points in time (then and now) uncontrollably and against her will, she finds that seemingly small actions in the past, alter the version of the present she returns to. She then realises that the purpose for this impossible gift is to change the course of time and to stop what happened to her mother at all costs. What she doesn't count on of course, is falling in love with a guy back in the seventies. Having worked out that if she stops the act that created her then Luna will cease to exist, she is faced with a choice. Her life, or her mothers? This was an amazing book about sacrifice, forgiveness, choices, and the impossibilities of love and life. There were certainly twists and turns throughout, with some revelations even more shocking than the initial one and although I had a number of theories about how it would end, it turned out to be a much happier (and less poetic) ending than I expected. And the epilogue will give you goosebumps and have your head spinning for days - time travel is a very complicated concept!

I have loved these books for as long as I can remember. I don't know if I would love them quite the same if I read them for the first time now, but I read The Summer I Turned Pretty back in the summer when I turned 14, which was quite literally the summer I turned pretty so the book rung true and stayed in my heart ever since. Belly (short for Isabel) has spent every summer of her life going to her friends beach house with her mum and brother, Steven, and it is her favourite time of year. There's Susannah (the second mum she never had), Jeremiah (her best friend since forever) and Conrad (the boy she's been in love with since she was 10 years old). The first book takes place over the summer she is about to turn 16 - a summer of first kisses and holiday romances and parties and finally feeling like one of the grown ups. With her ever-present feelings for Conrad finally stepping up a gear, and her friendship with Jeremiah quickly feeling like it's turning in to more, Belly finds herself in the middle of a love triangle. But which brother will she choose? Along with the present day story, the author builds the bigger picture through a number of flashbacks to previous summers, showing how well these characters truly know eachother. Throughout the whole book, you want Belly to be with Jeremiah. He's her best friend, he genuinely cares about her and you can see how much he likes her. However, Belly decides to follow her heart and the book ends with her going in to the sunset with Conrad. Cue book 2. It's Not Summer Without You doesn't start quite so happily. Susannah has died (after the cancer you find out she has at the end of book 1), Belly and Conrad have broken up and it's the first summer they're not spending all together at the beach house. But when Conrad does a runner from college before his big exams, Jeremiah enlists Belly to help find him and drag him back. He's not exactly thrilled to see them and through flashback chapters over the last year, you discover why. As well as that through, you also get some chapters from another characters perspective; Jeremiah's. He's loved Belly for a long time and being the younger brother, this isn't the first time he's been made to feel inferior to his older brother. But with the summer beach house in jeopardy, the three of them must work together to save it (and Susannah's legacy) before time runs out. With history repeating itself, Belly finds herself once again caught between two brothers, and her feelings for each of them. But when it comes down to it, this time she follows her head and chooses Jeremiah, the boy that would never hurt her. Or so she thinks. Fast forward 2 years and it's on to book 3. We'll Always Have Summer starts when Belly finishes her first year at college. Her and Jeremiah have been together for 2 years and are happier than ever, before she finds out that he's cheated on her. With Jeremiah desperate to fix his mistake and Belly still trying to convince herself that her feelings for Conrad don't exist anymore, the two decide to get married and what better place for Belly to plan the wedding than in her favourite place; the beach house. But Conrad is back for the first time in 2 years and with him also staying at the beach house, it's only a matter of time before things get complicated again. Belly always knew she'd end up with the last name Fisher at some point and it's finally time to decide once and for all which one them will give it her. And more importantly, who's heart she must break to get there. With chapters form Conrad thrown in this time, the third book is my favourite of the 3 and is actually the only one of the trilogy I read this year (I know the others so well anyway and I had a luggage allowance to stick to). There are certain chapters that make me cry every single time I read them and this trilogy is a must for any young adult readers, as they perfectly sum up what it means to love, to have lost, to grow up, to fall apart, to piece yourself back together, to understand who you are and to learn to follow your heart. For anyone who is currently on the bridge between who you were and who you're about to become, you will love these books.

Definitely a change of pace from the last book with this one! Swapping from the heartfelt coming-of-age genre and on to a book filled with filth and frolicking. The List is a story about Phoebe, a woman in her early thirties who broke up with her long-term boyfriend after finding him in bed with another woman. A year on and as the clock strikes midnight for the new year, she decides she needs to take her love life (and more importantly, her sex life) in to her own hands. So she comprises a list of 10 things she's always wanted to try in bed and enlists the help of her casanova best friend, Oliver, to start checking some items off. And obviously because he's such a man whore, it will remain uncomplicated with no feelings involved right? Well that side of the story goes as you might expect (without being predictable somehow) but the book was literally laugh-out-loud with plenty of adventures along the way, including an escapade with a lovesick younger guy and a rather unconventional arrangement with her boss. Written in the style of a diary over the course of a year, the dialogue is witty and hilarious, the connection between Phoebe and Oliver is heartfelt and genuine and the situations that Phoebe manages to get herself in to will have you laughing for days. A modern and less-vanilla take on Bridget Jones, I did suspect that the book might be based on the authors life or something (the conversations and situations seemed too diabolical to have been made up) but I haven't managed to find anything on google to prove my theory. I wasn't all too keen on the ending (another example of why I thought it might have been a true story, without spoiling it too much). Well not so much the actual ending, more the events that lead up to the ending but the actual ending was a happy one and the one that I was hoping for, even if we didn't get the kiss-finale that we should've. I also really liked that it was a dirty book that was actually about real life. None of this fifty-shades, sex-by-candlelight stuff but about a woman owning her own sexuality and having a hell of a lot of fun doing it, in ways that people in real life actually have sex. In fact, every aspect of the book felt very real-life. Phoebe hates her job but she doesn't magically step in to her dream career by the end; things go a hell of a lot more realistically than that. Overall it was the perfect holiday read and had me hooked from start to finish. And to my delight, I've just found out that there's a sequel! So that has been ordered and will be here in 3-5 working days so look out for it in my next jenni from the book post!

This is certainly the most 2018 book I've ever read. Daisy is a marketing manager who lives her life through her phone. Every moment is instagrammed, tweeted and shared on facebook and her dating life has been withered down to swiping left and right. Until she accidentally sends an appropriate tweet from her work twitter account rather than her own, leading not only to her losing her job, but to her sister whisking her away on a digital detox to a remote village in Cumbria, to live phone-less for a few weeks. What initially seems like a story about disconnecting, quickly becomes a story of reconnecting as Daisy and her sister Rosie bond in a way they never did growing up. And while her phone is no longer a distraction, Daisy manages to find herself a few others in the sexy french guy living with them, the rugged guy next door and the gossiping villagers nearby. I have to say that while I enjoyed this book, it never truly gripped me. I felt like I was just waiting for something truly exciting to happen and it never did. The book was predictable at best, boring at worst and like a lot of cliche chick flick novels, the hiccup in the perfect love story, is purely down to a lack of communication and essentially a mix-up, rather than anything dramatic actually happening. I did find that a lot of it rang quite true (with me also working in marketing) and there were a lot of good comments about today's society; how much we rely on technology and how we never switch off. And although I did think it was a good comment on society in general that when people come together, they spend the time on their phones instead of having quality time with eachother, I'm proud to say that when I'm out with friends or family, I take my cocktail/food photos but then our phones go away so that we can have proper conversations. Overall, it was an okay holiday read but not one that I'd read again and not one that I'll remember for very long. It seems the shelf life on this book is only about as long as that of a tweet, ironically...

I really don't know what to make of this book; I can't quite work out if I liked it or not. The story begins with Nell and Van, who are both five years old when her dad and his mum fall in love and move in together. Nell and Van quickly become firm friends and stay that way for five years until tragedy strikes and they are ripped apart, separated by thousands of miles. It's another five years before they see eachother again, when 15 year old Van comes over from Australia to stay with Nell and her dad. But things don't feel as they once did. Nell and Van no longer share the innocent friendship they did as children, but instead sparks start to fly in a way they've never experienced before. As they both struggle with their desire for eachother, as well as their thoughts that their feelings are wrong, they manage to share a few frenzied kisses before Nell's dad catches them and they are again separated by geography. And so the story goes. Every five years, they are reunited by chance, tragedy and circumstance, each time re-evaluating how they feel about eachother and where they go from there. But with Nell's life firmly set in Cornwall, and Van's built on the other side of the world in Australia, are they ever destined to be together? My first comment is that I loved the way this book was written. It was very well written in terms of how the author provoked emotions and conjured pictures in the readers head and I also loved that it spanned 4 whole decades, each chapter picking up five years later and filling in the gaps of the past. The early chapters are exciting and at first, it seemed weird that in 5 years, they basically went from brother and sister to wanting to have sex with eachother, but there was a forbidden love element that was pretty hooking. The later chapters turn in to more of a tragic love story though as the currents of love and circumstance continue to rip these two star-crossed lovers apart. The book also covered other aspects of life pretty honestly, such as expectations, loss, family and how your life can sometimes turn out compared to how you wanted it to. By the end, I was rooting for these two to finally get a happy ending but this book is more akin to One Day or 500 Days of Summer. It's not a love story. It's a story about love, and of life. So (spoiler alert) it seems that Van and Nell were destined to keep coming together but never destined to be together. And although the message is slightly heartbreaking, the author really conveys that the two loved eachother enough to want to see them happy - even if that wasn't together.