Swallowtail Summer by Erica James

Thanks to Tracy Fenton and the Publishers for the opportunity to host one of the stops on the Blog tour of this book.



From Goodreads

A captivating story about friendship, making changes, and learning to live life to the fullest from SUNDAY TIMES bestseller Erica James.

They thought they were friends for life - until one summer, everything changed . . .

Linston End on the Norfolk Broads has been the holiday home to three families for many years. The memories of their time there are ingrained in their hearts: picnics on the river, gin and tonics in the pavilion at dusk, hours spent seeking out the local swallowtail butterflies. Everyone together.

But widower Alastair has been faced with a few of life's surprises recently. Now, he is about to shock his circle of friends with the decisions he has made - and the changes it will mean for them all. For some, it feels like the end. For others, it might just be the beginning . . .

My thoughts

Erica James has quite a back catalogue of books to her name and if you've not read any of her books yet, then why not pop your cherry with this one.

The story is more character driven and seems to be a little more in depth into the relationships between them, not in a romantic way more in the way that they all interact with one another as siblings, relations and friends.

Linston End is a property that seems to have a life of it's own, a holiday home set on the Norfolk Broads it appears as an integral character to the story and is responsible in so many ways for what happens in this story.

At the beginning of the story we are introduced to many characters all at once and it takes a little while to realise who is who and who is related to who and in what way. It's told from the perspective of several of the characters, so you need to be able to get inside their heads quite quickly.

As history almost repeats itself, an event that occurs one night is set to have huge repercussions on some of the characters. Will they ever get over the events of that night or not?

Alastair is one of the main characters, he is a widower who meets and falls in love with Valentina (in my opinion she's not a very likeable character for many reasons that I won't go into), as his plans for the future are set to create ripples on the Broads that the rest of them might find hard to swallow, as life in the future might be set to change for all of them.

Will Alastair's plans be for the better or for the worse for everyone concerned? To answer that you will need to grab a copy of this book and immerse yourself in their lives.

I quite enjoyed this story as it was a refreshing change to other stories by Erica James. I look forward to reading her next book to see if character driven stories are the way that she is going with her writing, rather than the more romance based stories of the past.