Review: The Dog Share by Fiona Gibson

 Suzy Medley is having a bad day…

… when a shabby terrier turns up at her door. Just like Suzy, Scout has been abandoned, although only Suzy has been left with a financial mess and a business in tatters thanks to her ex.

Suzy takes Scout in and her chaotic world changes in unexpected ways: strangers have never been more welcoming and her teenage kids can’t wait to come home to visit.

Then a chance encounter on a windy Hebridean beach makes things more complicated, because Suzy isn’t the only one who needs a friend.

Scout has plenty of love to go round… but does Suzy?

Review: Ok if you're going into this book thinking this is going to be all about dogs then far not. Scout is a main character in this book but Suzy is really our main character and she is great fun to spend time with. We also get to meet Ricky who is a male character who get's to have feelings and insecurities-huzzah! The thing that I really loved about this book thought was the setting. I love spending time in Scotland and we got to see a Scottish Island,  distillery, Glasgow and Oban in this book-what more could you want. 

Fiona Gibson has a talent for writing female character later in life. We always get to read about the happily ever after but what about when that happily ever after comes to an end and you're turning fifty and you want to know what comes next? Fiona Gibson allows her characters to get to that point and guides us as readers as to what happens next. She tells it like it is and Suzy reacted in a great way to every that Fiona threw at her. She was just a sensible human and we all need more of those in our lives right now!

As already mentioned Ricky is a male character who is allowed to have insecurities and emotions of his own. Due to the fact that we have chapters from Suzy's point of view and chapters from Rickey's point of view we get to explore what is going on inside Ricky's mind. He has had it just as tough as Suzy and I love that he is having to care for both his son and his father on his own. We get to see the toll that takes on him and how it causes him to look for love an affection is the most unlikely of places. 

Yes of course we have Scout the dog and we get to see him go through the recuse process and all of that entails but can we talk about the Whisky distillery for a moment please? I may not be a dog person but I am a whisky person and I loved the idea of Suzy having this distillery hanging over her. She visits the distillery with her husband during happy times but now it is hanging a little like the rock around her neck and I loved learning about the ins and outs of running that business-it really stuck out as a unique feature of a romcom novel to me. 

The things I really took away from this book were the fully formed characters, the great setting and the inclusion of a distillery in this novel. Fiona Gibson once again weaves a great tale. I listened to this on audiobook and the narrators did a great job even with the different between an inner Hebrides accent, an Oban accent and a Glasgow accent. Highly recommend!

To order your copy now, just click the link: UK or US

Review: Five Hundred Miles from You by Jenny Colgan

Lissa loves her job as a nurse, but recently she's been doing a better job of looking after other people than looking after herself. After a traumatic incident at work leaves her feeling overwhelmed, she agrees to swap lives with someone in a quiet village in Scotland.

Cormac is restless. Just out of the army, he's desperately in need of distraction, and there's precious little of it in Kirrinfief. Maybe three months in London is just what he needs.

As Lissa and Cormac warm to their new lives, emailing back and forth about anything and everything, finally things seem to be falling into place. But each of them feel there's still a piece missing. What - or who - could it be?

And what if it's currently five hundred miles away?

 

Review: This book is a lesson in how books can be both wildly romantic but also impressively real life at the same time. It has been too long since I have been immersed in a Jenny Colgan novel and I am so happy to be back in her world once again, this truly was a triumph. 

I absolutely loved the premise behind this novel, the idea of a job swap and living in one another's lives in the best kind of meet cute there could be and both of these characters were the kind of people who needed that change to push them out of their comfort zones and really make them sit up and take notice. I loved watching the journey that Lissa and Cormac both took during the course of this book. I loved all the intricate details they both knew about each other's lives and those we were let into as reader-it felt really special. 

Lissa is a really cool character to get to know because we know she has gone through a trauma, we start the book with that and so seeing how she deals with that instantly lets us into the secret of her character. Then taking her out of her comfort zone and dropping her in the middle of nowhere to sink or swim was really fun. I loved Cormac from the start, I would really love to have met him in real life and he is the person I would really like to see more from in future Jenny Colgan novels. I loved how he handled himself and I really liked watching his journey of bringing some Scottish heart to London. 

The book is a dual narrative of sorts which always make for a quicker read for me but there is occasionally a third voice, a kind of narrator who I can only assume is Jenny Colgan talking to us and this made the book read just a little like a fairytale, I felt it added another level and really appreciated it. I also feel like the setting added another level, I loved the juxtaposition between the Scottish setting and the urban hum of London. Having spent time living in both settings I could feel the difference coming off the pages and this writer’s description triggering lots of memories for me. 

I listened to this book on audio and the narrator did a really great job. When the book had both an English and a Scottish character I was prepared to be let down by the narrator's accents but she did really well with both accents and dialects and so I highly recommend this book to you in whatever format you choose. 

To order your copy now, just click the link: UK or US

Blog Tour: Review of Fairy Rock by Stephen Watt

Today is my stop on the blog tour for Fairy Rock by Stephen Watt and I have a review to share with you. If you like the sound of that, there's more information about the author and a buy link at the bottom of this post. Don't forget to check out the other stops on the tour for more exclusive content and reviews!

Here's what it's all about...

In 2017 Andrew Smith, then Director, now Chair of the Scottish Writers’ Centre, came up with a dynamic idea to run a Twitter campaign inviting poets to pitch an idea and the winner would have a poetry pamphlet published by the SWC’s publisher partner, Red Squirrel Press. Poet, critic, essayist, editor, designer and typesetter Gerry Cambridge, poet Sheila Templeton, writer, musician and Editor of both Postbox Press (the literary fiction imprint of Red Squirrel Press) and Postbox International Short Story Magazine, Colin Will, and myself took part in a panel at the SWC, ‘How to get published’ in October 2017. Andrew received many entries, a shortlist was drawn up, Stephen Watt subsequently won and persuaded me to publish a full-length collection.

— Sheila Wakefield, Founding Editor, Red Squirrel Press

Glasgow is correctly lauded for its wonderful characters and hospitality but at the turn of the Millennium it was dubbed the ‘Murder Capital of Europe’ with sectarian divisions and organised crime rife in the city. Four of its natives have been raised around the city’s Bridgeton area, cultivated by its ill-omened beliefs, and now have to separately find a way to subsist. But one crime family firmly believes in the tradition of torture and a novel way of disposing of its detractors. Who will emerge smelling of roses—or end up pushing the roses up from the earth below?

Review: It was so interesting to read a crime novel set in verse. I love reading poetry, especially modern poetry and so this was such a refreshing read for me. We get snippets of the characters in this book through individual poems and then move back and forth between the narrative and the characters are the book progresses. 

I am always saying that I want to read more books set in Glasgow and so this was wonderful for me because it was set among streets and buildings I could recognise and I could really place myself there. If you haven't been to Glasgow, not to worry, everything is described so vividly, you will feel like you have by the time you;re done. 

This book does contain a lot of violence and violence in ways you can't even imagine violence being. Because this book is written in verse though it does seem to take the edge off somehow. You get distracted by the poetic language and the figurative sentences and so don't notice the extreme gore and the truly terrible death. 

I loved reading this authors writing, his descriptions were really vivid and even when gory, they were beautiful. If you feel like you can stomach it and you want something just that little bit different then I do recommend this one to you. 

About the Author

Stephen Watt was born in the Vale of Leven in 1979. His awards include first prize in the Poetry Rivals Slam, the StAnza International Digital Poetry Slam, and the Tartan Treasures award. Notable collections which he has curated include the Joe Strummer Foundation collection Ashes To Activists (2018) and the James Watt bicentenary booklet Horsepower (2019). He is Dumbarton Football Club’s Poet-in-Residence and was appointed the Makar for the Federation of Writers (Scotland) in 2019. He lives in Dumbarton with his wife Keriann and pug Beanz.

Buy Link 

https://www.redsquirrelpress.com/product-page/fairy-rock-stephen-watt  

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