Welcome to my review of Ever After by Amanda Prowse
What They Say:
From the bestselling author of The Girl in the Corner and Swimming to Lundy, comes a hopeful and inspiring story about the possibilities that await when you dare to start again.
If you’re given another chance at love, shouldn’t you take it?
Enya’s life has become small. Her husband’s death has left her bereft, and though she’s only in her early fifties, she’s happiest looking after her son, Aiden, his childhood sweetheart, Holly, and her beloved cat, Pickle.
So the spark she feels for the stranger who bumps into her car in the airport car park is a complete shock. But Enya can’t stop thinking about him.
Then, when Aiden makes a life-changing decision, Enya suddenly finds her close-knit community thrown into chaos. Her best friend, Jenny, isn’t speaking to her, Aiden’s future hangs in the balance, Holly is devastated, and the stranger from the car park is suddenly in her life.
Torn between family, love and loyalty, Enya faces a dilemma: stay safely where she is, or take a leap into the unknown? Because maybe her happily-ever-after could have one more chapter yet…
What I Say:
I love an Amanda Prowse book! She's one of my auto-buy authors, but when I read the blurb and learned about Enya being a younger widow, like myself, I instantly felt connected to her on a deeper level.
Enya's world is very small, safe, and cosy. It was something she could control in a world of uncertainty. I understand that so much. I kept my world very small for the first year after my husband died. Everything was scary and just too much. Enya has a very close circle of family, chosen and blood, and she trusts them wholeheartedly. She loves them fiercely. They are her whole life. Her best friend Jenny has been her rock, her son Aiden has been her purpose, her reason to get up each morning. So when people around her start making big decisions, Enya feels lost again. The safe circle of family is suddenly blown apart by one decision and Enya feels like she's lost everything again. That's terrifying, and is part of the fear I have about letting people in.
I absolutely love the way that Amanda writes family drama. She's like no one else in the game. Her characters are flawed and relatable, you can actually feel the emotions emanating from the pages, and there is always enough tension and drama to keep you engaged with the story. She writes dialogue that makes you feel like you're watching a film. Like you can HEAR them in your mind, and I absolutely love that!
The author also uses real people and their experiences to help shape her characters and their own stories. I spoke to her and said that Enya felt like she was written just for me, and Amanda said she knew that before I did. She listened to me speak about my loss and she knew my husband and me well, so she built that into the book. I will never, ever forget that. The compassion and care that was poured into writing Enya's story will stay with me for a lifetime.
Don't worry though, this isn't just a story of a grieving widow. There is so much hope, heart, humour, and love in this book. It has genuinely changed something in me and made me start to heal. That's why I knew that Ever After had to be the first book on my book stack tattoo, and I can't wait for the day Mandy gets to see it and sign it in person.
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