Book Review: The Christmas Party by Karen Swan

The Christmas Party

by

Karen Swan

The Christmas Party is a delicious, page-turning story of romance, family and secrets.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia 
Imprint: Macmillan
Publication date: 29th October 2019
Genre: Contemporary Fiction / Romance
Pages: 400
RRP: $29.99 AUD
Format read: Trade paperback
Source: Courtesy of the publisher 

 

When Declan Lorne, the last remaining knight in Ireland, dies suddenly, an ancient title passes with him. But his estate on Ireland’s rugged south-west coast is left to his three daughters. The two eldest, Ottie and Pip, inherit in line with expectations, but to everyone’s surprise – and dismay – it is the errant baby of the family, Willow, who gets the castle.

Why her? Something unknown – something terrible - made her turn her back on her family three years earlier, escaping to Dublin and vowing never to return. So when Willow quickly announces she is selling up, her revenge seems sweet and the once-close sisters are pushed to breaking point: in desperation, Pip risks everything to secure her own future, and Ottie makes a decision that will ruin lives. It’s each woman for herself.

Before moving in, Connor Shaye, the prospective new owner, negotiates throwing a lavish party at the castle just days before Christmas – his hello, their goodbye. But as their secrets begin to catch up with them, Ottie, Willow and Pip are forced to ask themselves which is harder: stepping into the future, or letting go of the past?  

The Christmas Party, set in south-west Ireland, tells the story of the Lorne family living in the 700 year old Lorne Castle. Declan Lorne, the last living knight in Ireland, his wife Serena and their three grown daughters Ottie, Pip and Willow may be the end of the Lorne legacy. With no male heir and an ever mounting amount of costly repairs required on the ageing castle it looks like Lorne Castle will need to be sold.

The Christmas Party is a story of family, heritage and the massive financial burden of keeping an ageing castle intact. Swan also highlights the guilt felt when a century old family legacy can no longer be upheld.

This is a character driven novel told through the eyes of the three strong but very different Lorne sisters. Ottie loved Lorne Castle and spent her days helping her father run the estate. She also held a secret that caused her to become withdrawn. Pip is stubborn, a tom-boy and nuts about her horses but a long held grudge could cost her her life. Willow, the youngest Lorne, had fled to Dublin three years earlier with a devastating secret of her own.

Now all back together, after their father’s sudden death, the girls must work out their differences, trust each other, and decide how to move forward.

Each year I eagerly look forward to Karen Swan’s new Christmas title and The Christmas Party didn’t disappoint.

The story was totally engrossing with just the right amount of mystery running through the plot. The three Lorne sisters were strong women but they each made mistakes in life and had feelings of failure they needed to overcome.

Karen Swan has written another unforgettable novel with enough tension, mystery, romance and heart-break to keep you turning the pages.

This is one book that needs to be on your Christmas list. 

                     🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 

My rating 5/5

Click on the book covers to read my reviews of other Karen Swan titles.

   

Karen Swan is the Sunday Times top three bestselling author of sixteen books and her novels sell all over the world. She writes two books each year - one for the summer period and one for the Christmas season. Previous winter titles include Christmas at Tiffanys, The Christmas Secret, The Christmas Lights, and for summer, The Rome Affair, The Greek Escape and The Spanish Promise.

Her books are known for their evocative locations and Karen sees travel as vital research for each story. She loves to set deep, complicated love stories within twisty plots, sometimes telling two stories in the same book.

  

 

 

 

Book Bingo - Round 23 #BookBingo

Book Bingo is a reading challenge hosted by Theresa Smith Writes , Mrs B’s Book Reviews and The Book Muse. Every second Saturday, book bingo participants reveal which bingo category they have read and what book they chose. 

This week I have chosen the category ''Book by an author with the same initials as you" and as we have had to do a few double up weeks to fit all the categories in I am also doing "A book set in the Australian mountains".

A book by an author with the same initials as you:

For this category I did a quick search on Amazon to find an eBook I could read and came across Victoria James. What a great find! She has a whole swag of novels in the romance genre and I picked Christmas with the Sheriff the first book in her Shadow Creek, Montana series. 
I absolutely loved this best friends to lovers story. It's such a well worn trope but who doesn't love a happily ever after ending.
Julia is shattered after the death of her husband and son and flees her home town to live in the city. She returns five years later to spend Christmas with her in-laws. When she runs into best friend, now town sheriff, Chase, sparks begin to fly. But Julia is not ready to open her heart to loss again.
Victoria James knows how to bring out the emotion with themes of child neglect, loss and deep seated wounds but the story also has uplifting themes of family, community and second chances. 

My second category is:

A book set in the Australian Mountains:

I searched my shelves for a book to fit this category and came across this cute chapter book I purchased through Big Sky Publishing.
The Pink Snowman by Alan Horsfield is set in the Blue Mountains. 

It's snowing in the Blue Mountains and Krystal is bored...but not for long.
After a disasterous attempt to build a snowman, Krystal and her friend Jasper find themselves with a puzzling problem.
Not only has their snowman come alive, now he's turning pink, and he's not happy about it! 

This was a fun little chapter book with a couple of facts about snow and a few dad jokes thrown in and a touch of magical realism. 

#BookBingo2019

   

Book Club Book Review: Taking Tom Murray Home by Tim Slee

Taking Tom Murray Home

by

Tim Slee

Publisher: Harper Collins Australia 
Publication date: 22 July 2019
Pages:304
RRP: $32.99 AUD
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Format Read: Trade paperback
Source: Courtesy of the publisher via Beauty and Lace 

 

Bankrupt dairy farmer Tom Murray decides he'd rather sell off his herd and burn down his own house than hand them over to the bank. But something goes tragically wrong, and Tom dies in the blaze. His wife, Dawn, doesn't want him to have died for nothing and decides to hold a funeral procession for Tom as a protest, driving 350km from Yardley in country Victoria to bury him in Melbourne where he was born. To make a bigger impact she agrees with some neighbours to put his coffin on a horse and cart and take it slow - real slow.
But on the night of their departure, someone burns down the local bank. And as the motley funeral procession passes through Victoria, there are more mysterious arson attacks. Dawn has five days to get to Melbourne. Five days, five more towns, and a state ready to explode in flames...

Told with a laconic, deadpan wit, Taking Tom Murray Home is a timely, thought-provoking, heart-warming, quintessentially Australian story like no other. It's a novel about grief, pain, anger and loss, yes, but it's also about hope - and how community, friends and love trump pain and anger, every time.

 

Taking Tom Murray Home has a true Australian feel. The small farming community of Yardley bands together after Tom Murray is accidentally killed whilst burning down his own home. This was Tom’s act of defiance when the bank threatened to foreclose on his mortgage.

Narrated through 13 year old Jack Murray the story is heart-felt as Jack tries to understand his father’s death in his own way. We quite often get jack’s somewhat naive look on events.

Dawn Murray decides to pack Tom’s coffin on a milk cart drawn by a draft horse and take the trip to Melbourne, a journey of six days, where he will be buried. They garner much support along the way and with the inclusion of media and police Dawn has to remind everyone this is a funeral procession not a protest.

I quite enjoyed this story about people coming together to support each other but I’m not sure they achieved much. Told through the eyes of a thirteen year old the story is slow going and there isn’t much description of the surrounds. The inclusion of the condition of Analgesia was well plotted and believable. I don’t think I’ve come across this in a book before.

🌟🌟🌟🌟 

 My rating  4/5 

This review is from the Beauty & Lace Book Club 

@beautyandlacemag #beautyandlacebookclub 

and part of the Book Lover Book Review Aussie author challenge 

 

 

Tim Slee is an Australian journalist with a wanderlust. Born in Papua New Guinea to Australian parents who sprang from sheep country in the Mid-North and Far North of South Australia, he worked for several years for the Stock Journal in Adelaide before moving to Canberra and then Sydney where he worked for the Attorney General's Department. Since then he has lived in Denmark, Canada, Australia and is currently on contract in Denmark again with a multinational pharmaceutical company. Although, according to his favourite airline, he has been around the world with them 22 times and visited 54 countries, Australia is still his physical and emotional home base. Taking Tom Murray Home is his first novel, and the winner of the inaugural Banjo Prize 

 

Book Review: Blue Moon by Lee Child #BRPreview

Blue Moon

by

Lee Child

It's a random universe, but once in a blue moon things turn out just right.

Publisher: Penguin Books Australia

Imprint: Bantam Press

Publication Date: 29th October 2019

Series: Jack Reacher #24

Genre: Crime / Thriller

Pages: 384

RRP: $32.99 AUD

Format Read: Uncorrected proof copy

Source: Courtesy of the publisher via Better Reading

 

In a nameless city, two rival criminal gangs are competing for control. But they hadn’t counted on Jack Reacher arriving on their patch.

Reacher is trained to notice things.

He’s on a Greyhound bus, watching an elderly man sleeping in his seat, with a fat envelope of cash hanging out of his pocket. Another passenger is watching too ... hoping to get rich quick.

As the mugger makes his move, Reacher steps in.

The old man is grateful, yet he turns down Reacher’s offer to help him home. He’s vulnerable, scared, and clearly in big, big trouble.

What hold could the gangs have on the old guy? Will Reacher be in time to stop bad things happening?

Blue Moon reads as a standalone if, like me, you are new to the series.

When Reacher helps an elderly man after an attempted mugging he inadvertently gets caught up in the Albanian and Ukrainian turf wars in an unnamed American city.

Once Reacher becomes involved you know the odds move in your favour. But it’s not an easy road to recompense.

Reacher teams up with an unlikely bunch of civilians, Hogan an ex marine, Barton a musician, Vantresca an ex Army Commander and Abby a waitress to do battle with both the Albanian and the Ukrainian gangs. The fighting was brutal and bloody and I wondered whether this group would really shake it off so easily.

What starts as a minor take-over, in the city’s criminal underbelly, escalates to an out of control tit for tat as the two gangs have no idea what they are fighting over.

The story is filled with plenty of action and danger, including blow by blow descriptions as every situation is sized up in full detail.

The inclusion of dry humour is a respite from the violence. The body count is high in this novel. I lost count at forty-five!

If you are new to the series or already a Reacher fan this book will not disappoint. 

                           🌟🌟🌟🌟 

My rating  4/5

 

Photo Credit: Penguin Books

Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world and have sold over one hundred million copies. Two blockbusting Jack Reacher movies have been made so far. He is the recipient of many awards, most recently the CWA’s Diamond Dagger for a writer of an outstanding body of crime fiction, the International Thriller Writers’ ThrillerMaster, and the Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award.

 

 

 

 

Book Bingo - Round 22 #BookBingo

Book Bingo is a reading challenge hosted by Theresa Smith Writes , Mrs B’s Book Reviews and The Book Muse. Every second Saturday, book bingo participants reveal which bingo category they have read and what book they chose. 

This week I have chosen the category ''A beloved classic" and as we have had to do a few double up weeks to fit all the categories in I am also doing "A book written by an Australian woman more than 10 years ago".

A beloved classic:

For this category I have chosen 'Brer Rabbit Again by Enid Blyton'

I'm so glad I pulled this down from my shelves after many, many years. I remember as a child thinking how funny and tricky Brer Rabbit was. You would think a fox would be wily and cunning but Brer Rabbit outwits him every time and he can't quite figure out how.

"There is a trick somewhere!" thought Brer Wolf to himself.
"Brer Bear knew there was a trick somewhere. But what it was he could NOT think." 

The animals fight, steal and plot against each other and Brer Rabbit always comes out laughing in these wits against brawn tales.
Anthropomorphism has always been and will continue to be a part of children's literature. Using animals to act out real life situations can be less confrontational for children.

My much loved copy. At some stage the dust jacket has become torn so I have cut it out and sticky taped it to the cover. 😃

A book written by an Australian woman more than 10 years ago:

For this category I have chosen 'Odd One Out by Monica McInerney'
Published in 2006.

I would like to thank another bingo participant Jenny for this book idea. I wasn't sure what I would read for this category preferring to find books on my shelf rather than buy more. When I saw Jenny use this book I knew I had it on my shelf and it was the perfect choice.

Sylvie Devereaux comes from a Sydney based family of successful, artistic people. She was the dogsbody always running around doing jobs for her mother and two sisters. She organised their lives and she was good at it but they didn't appreciate her. Her older brother lived in Melbourne. She didn't see him often but he was always on her side. He encourages her to come to Melbourne for a holiday. Away from all the hectic organising Sylvie gets a chance to reevaluate her life.

I loved Sylvie immediately. She had a heart of gold and even though she was being manipulated by her family I don't think the family could see how they were treating her. She really needed to stand up for herself.
The story is full of natural banter and humour which makes for an easy and fun read. It's not all plain sailing for Sylvie as she has some highs and lows before she finally decides to do what she wants to do in life.
The character of Great Aunt Mill is wonderful. She is in her 70's. Her health is declining a bit and some of the family may think she is a bit loopy but she is always there for Sylvie with some sound advice and a few handy hints.

 #BookBingo2019