Afternoon Everyone,

Hope you’re all good and had a marvellous weekend. How lucky we are in the UK to be experiencing some actual summer weather at the moment. I know a lot of people are not enjoying it and I’m seeing a lot of complaining. I on the other hand am loving every single minute of it and I will be soaking up all of the sunshine before it disappears again.

Book 📖

Thank you to @michaeljbooks and Lesley Pearse for this advanced copy of Deception in return for an honest review. Deception was published on 7th July 2022 (apologies for the late review!) and you can get a copy here.

Description 🔖

Following the funeral of Alice’s mother Sally, she is approached by a man; Angus Tweedy who claims to be her biological father. This is a complete shock to Alice and she is struggling to reconcile the fact that Ralph, the man that has loved and raised her isn’t her true father.

Alice always knew that her mother had faults and kept secrets but learning this information sets her off on a path to find out more about her life before Ralph. She wants to uncover the whole truth; the good and the bad.

General Thoughts 🤔

Before starting this book, I didn’t know if I was going to be getting sad vibes, happy vibes or something in between and to be honest, I feel a mix up of all of the emotions after having finished. Following Alice’s journey into her mother’s past felt like I was experiencing all of the surprises along with her. It was certainly a reminder to me that we’re all just humans. We tend to hold our parents to such a high standard when in reality they make mistakes and bad decisions the same as anyone else.

Characters 👫👭👬

I really liked Alice, mostly due to her ability to be rational and level headed. No matter what she found out, she always seemed to be able to keep calm and understand things from her mother’s perspective. Not only that but she carried the burden of this on behalf of her younger sister and her dad to protect them. It was interesting to read about Alice realising that some of her own character traits were inherited from her mother.

Fleur was probably my favourite character to read about in the story. What a complicated, troubled and yet incredibly strong woman she was. Despite a bad start in life and many obstacles, she seemed to keep going. Some of her decisions were questionable but I found it difficult to judge her for them. She hadn’t had an easy life and even when she did find her peace, I’m sure her past troubled her right until the end.

Writing Style ✍️

The book was told from both Alice and Fleur’s perspectives and straddled two different timelines. Alice’s chapters were present day and Fleur’s went all the way back to the 1940s. I loved this structure in the book and I particularly liked going back in time. I thought that Lesley Pearse did a fantastic job of capturing the era she was writing about; especially the 1960s. I felt all of the hippy vibes through the pages.

What I liked most about this authors writing was her ability to create characters that were complicated and messy but very relatable and likeable. It wasn’t the kind of story where I was wish wishing for a happy ending for everyone, I felt like I was wishing for contentment and closure. Which I suppose is arguably a happy ending.

Conclusion and Scoring 🎖

I found parts of this book heart warming, parts of it difficult to read and parts of it sad. So basically it made me feel many many things and I thoroughly enjoyed it all. If you like a character driven story that spans different times in history, then this is definitely a book for you.

😍😍😍😍😩