beneath the apple blossom – A Keyboard and an Open Mind

t’s time for WWW Wednesday! This blog hop is hosted by Sam over at A World Of Words. Link up with us by commenting on Sam’s post for this week, and just answer the three questions.

What have you recently finished reading?

I had a good week this week, polishing off two books from my April-June TBR. I’m not quite going to get everything ticked off but I’ll come close! The books I read were The Mystery and Maplemead Castle by Kitty French, which was just plain fun, and Beneath the Apple Blossom by Kate Frost, which was a lot heavier, but I couldn’t put it down.

I also posted reviews of Ensnared by Rita Stradling and Beneath the Apple Blossom. Click the titles to read them.

What are you currently reading?

No movement on Dracula by Bram Stoker this week. I’ll get back to it in July.

I have listened to the majority of The Prestige by Christopher Priest now. I was a bit worried that the second half was going to drag (I thought it was heading towards the climax then realised that I was only at 45%) but it is still interesting and I’m about two-thirds of the way through now.

And I have finally started reading The Ship Beyond Time by Heidi Heilig, the sequel to The Girl From Everywhere, which I read about 18 months ago and reviewed here. I haven’t had much time to read so I’m still only at about 15%, but it’s starting to get going. I am worried it might be focusing more on the romance than the time travel, but some of the reviews assure me this is not really the case, so fingers crossed.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I’m going to try reading The Bloodshade Encounters/The Songspinner by K. C. Finn. This is two novellas in one volume, they are prequels, I guess? to The Book of Shade, the first part of the Shadeborn series. I’ve read about 10% and I have a bad feeling this is going to suffer a bit from it’s-been-too-long-since-I-read-the-first-one syndrome; I can’t really remember who the characters are so reading their backstories isn’t meaning much. But I did buy it so I’m going to give it a bit more of a go.

What are you reading this week? 🙂

P.S. If you feel so inclined, head on over to my writing blog, Letting the Voices Out, where I’ve shared an excerpt from my current WIP today.

Title: Beneath the Apple Blossom (The Hopeful Years #1)
Author: Kate Frost
Genre: Adult contemporary fiction
Date Read: 23/06/2017 – 24/06/2017
Rating: ★★★★

Review:

The experiences depicted in this book are worlds away from any experience I have had, and worlds away from what I usually read, and yet I found myself unable to put it down (I’m starting this review at 12:54am after staying up to finish it, because I’m still thinking about it, and wide awake).

Beneath the Apple Blossom depicts the lives of four women with four very different experiences of motherhood and the journey towards it. Pippa and Connie meet online through a forum for women undergoing IVF and bond through the ups and downs of treatment. Georgie feels she had her first child too young, and isn’t ready for the second one her husband clearly wants. And Sienna has her heart set on never having kids, when her life is thrown into turmoil…

Frost presents these four women and their stories without any judgement, leaving the reader to form their own opinions. I think this is an advantage of the novel, as seeing the way things panned out and the way the characters reacted to events and to each other was what made me want to keep reading. I didn’t always agree with the choices the characters made, but I couldn’t really fault any of them for making them (well, maybe sometimes, but only a bit).

The only real qualm I had with the novel was that sometimes the characters’ thoughts got a bit repetitive. While I can appreciate that women going through the sorts of things that these characters are would have quite cyclical thoughts, as a reader, I sometimes found that returning to the same “Why did it have to happen this way? What am I going to do now?” trains of thought chapter after chapter became a bit stale.

I definitely recommend this book, even if motherhood and constant talk of babies isn’t really your thing (it’s not mine). This gives insight into the struggles all sorts of women go through, as well as identifying those “what not to do” moments for the rest of us (I already knew this, but for anyone else, don’t say “You can always adopt”, no matter how good your intentions are by it). After giving five stars to Kate’s debut novel, The Butterfly Storm, a few years ago, I was fairly confident I would enjoy this one, and she does not disappoint.

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