In 2013 Dani Atkins broke my heart with her debut novel Fractured, which was all sorts of amazing. It was an emotional read, yes, but also an incredibly beautiful and unique one as it detailed the two possible paths in protagonist Rachel's life and her trying to discover which one was real, and which one was a figment of her imagination. It shouldn't come as a surprise that with her latest novel, Our Song, Dani Atkins once more lets different stories collide in a fascinating yet devastating way.
When two husbands are rushed into hospital under life-threatening circumstances on the same day, their wives meet in the Relatives' Room as they're waiting for news from the doctors. Except, this isn't the first time they've met. Ally and Charlotte have a complicated history as they were roommates in university and eventually Charlotte started dating Ally's then boyfriend, David. This forced an even deeper rift in what was already a very tentative friendship between the two women. Not to mention the fact that David (being one of the men fighting for his life in hospital) has Ally worried sick not about one person that night, her own husband Joe, but two.
Dani Atkins excels at bringing together different paths of a person's live. Her stories are rooted deeply in destiny and with Our Song she has done so again. Though rather than giving her protagonist two different paths to a possible future, this time around the choice has already been made and it is the consequences of it that all the characters have to try to come to terms with. It's easy to get stuck in the past and relive the happiest of moments, but it's what's in the here-and-now that is most important and both Ally and Charlotte have to come to the realisation that the direction their lives have taken is how it should've been all along.
Fast-forward a few years and I admit that beyond the discovery that I do occasional enjoy this type of novel, I fell back into my small world of picking up books within the same genres I always had by the same authors I always read. It took the release of Lucy's second novel to remind me that there is more out there and leave my comfort zone once more, this time to be transported to 1980s Burma. Once more Lucy has written an impeccably researched novel to create a heart-wrenching and haunting story of different people's lives colliding in the worst possible way amid the terror and confusion of a Civil War.
The rebels and the government are in an impossible stand-off where there can no longer be any winners as there is little beyond fear, corruption and ultimately death on both sides. One of the people caught in the horrific events playing out is Thuza Win, who was just a child when her parents were beaten in front of her eyes and taken away. The people who took her parents also slashed her tongue and now she is known as Naga-Ma, serpent, among the local people. She tries to not let the locals bother her and instead she focuses all her time and energy on smuggling rubies across the border to help her brother in the rebel camp and save up enough money to get to Rangoon and save her parents from prison.
I bloody love Lindsey Kelk, you guys! She is an absolute hoot and her books are so fresh and funny, and adding a festive touch to her latest one makes it all the more perfect. A Girl's Best Friend is the third part in the About a Girl series and follows on from Tess' adventures in Milan in What a Girl Wants. While this could potentially be read as a stand-alone, I recommend reading the books in the right order. Not only to fully understand the backstory of all the characters involved, but also because these are Lindsey's best novels yet and you don't want to be missing out on any of them.
There is little I can say about Lindsey's latest novel that I haven't already said about her before; her characters are incredibly realistic and relatable, they end up in the most ridiculously laugh-out-loud funny situations, and her writing is such fun. She always makes me snort out loud on my commute and that is no mean feat when I'm in travelling home in an over-packed and delayed tube after yet another stressful day of work. Lindsey’s novels are the perfect remedy for the current miserable London weather and the miserable Londoners that result from that.
After the death of Will, Louisa did as she had promised him. She lived. She travelled, went to Paris and even got a flat in London. But this feeling of freedom only lasted so long as she needed to pay her bills. Now she's working at an Irish bar at the airport and outside of her job she doesn't have much of a life. Instead of really living, Lou is stuck in a rut and on the verge of depression. So when she falls off the roof her apartment building and breaks pretty much every bone in her body, nobody really believes it was just an accident and that she heard a voice before she fell.
But there really was someone else there with her that night, someone who will soon impact upon Lou's life just as much as Will did – for good and bad. And it's up to Lou to make the difficult decision between focusing on a distraction from the pain and anger she feels over the loss of Will, and finding the courage and strength to move on and really live.
It was curiosity more than anything that made me keen to read this novel and while I am a big fan of Jojo Moyes' writing (The Girl You Left Behind is one of my favourite novels ever), I unfortunately didn't feel the love for this novel from the get-go. It was a combination of my own initial doubts over whether there was a need for a sequel to Me Before You, and a story that felt just too depressing after I had envisioned Lou to be a much stronger person following the journey she went through with Will in the first novel, yet here she was back to square one – or worse.