Some of you might remember that last Christmas, I selected 3 books that I wanted to read and promised to write a review of them once I had read them. If you have not seen that post I will link it here.

The first book I read was Christmas at Woolworths by Elaine Everest. I must admit that the story started off a bit too slow for my liking and I found it difficult to remember who was who. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’d mentioned in my original blog post that I would read this book to review, I would have probably given up and moved onto something else. The book is part of a series though so perhaps I should have read them in order of their release date which might have made it a bit easier to understand from the outset. As I mentioned above, I did feel the need to persevere with the book and I’m glad I did because it comes alive in the middle and had me hooked right up until the end. I had never read any books by Elaine Everest before and was unsure if I would like her writing, however its such a lovely underlying story within the book which had me wishing I was part of the close knit community I was reading about.

The next book I chose was Christmas with the bomb girls by Daisy Styles. This again is part of a series but this time, I had actually read all of the previous ones and loved them, so I knew I would enjoy this book. Over the last few years, I’ve felt like I’ve really got to know the characters, almost as if they were my friends. I do think this is the type of book where you need to have read the other ones in the series first to really understand how much the characters have evolved over time and therefore why they react to certain situations in the way in which they do. Personally I think Daisy Styles is an amazing writer and this book had me gripped right from the start due to a secret that I wanted to discover what it was. You don’t actually find out what the secret is until the middle of the book but throughout the story, there were some unexpected turns that sometimes made me laugh, sometimes made me cry and even sometimes shocked me. I just keep wanting to read more and found that I couldn’t put the book down.

The last book in the trio that I chose to read and review was Winter on the Mersey by Annie Groves. I have been a huge fan of Annie’s books for a long time and hers were actually the first adult fiction books that I read and I’ve been hooked ever since. Usually with her books, I tend to get straight into them and read them any spare moment I get, however on this occasion, I did find it a bit slow to start with and I had huge difficulty in placing all of the characters because there are so many to remember. Having said this, I did get into the story by the middle and found a few twists and turns that I wasn’t expecting. The story hit home to me just how turbulent, tragic and sad some events in the second world war really were.

Overall in the end, I loved reading all three books and have since passed them on to a relative for them to enjoy. I have this months reading list all ready to go and will write another book review post at the end of the month.