The Remarkable Rise of Amanda Appleby by Trish MoreyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Amanda Appleby thinks she's living her best life. As they celebrate her plastic surgeon husband Rufus' 50th birthday in their forever home which she has totally renovated surrounded by friends and their two children. Then Amanda stumbles across Rufus and the belly dancer she hired as entertainment entertaining themselves in a very adult way on her bed.
Everything she valued crumbled into dust, especially when it turned out Rufus had mortgaged the house to the hilt and sold the London flat to subsidise his share of a loss-making horse-breeding syndicate. Walking out of a marriage after 25 years with only £78,000 to show for it is devastating, luckily Amanda still owns the tiny fisherman's cottage in St Ives that belonged to her parents. Once a holiday home it's now her permanent home.
Having spent 25 years being a homemaker and mother, with just the occasional bit of volunteering at a charity shop Amanda is pessimistic about her chances in the job market, until a boozy night with her next door neighbour watching Fifty Shades Darker gives her the idea of self-publishing a novel on the internet about achieving the highest selling price for a house and downsizing - two things she has just done with some success. Writing tongue-in-cheek, eg talking about throwing out your ex with the rest of the clutter, the book soon becomes a success, Amanda gets an agent and a publishing deal for a second book.
Amanda's new agent is of the shark variety and soon has her appearing on chat shows and being interviewed by women's magazines, but when she finds herself a contestant on a Blind Date-type dating show for the more mature person she realises she and her agent may not be reading from the same agenda. When Amanda refuses to parrot the cheesy lines the scriptwriter has written, instead making it very clear to the audience that she is not interested in dating an insurance salesman from Scotland, the audience loves her and the show gets record ratings. The show decides to capitalise on the success of Amanda's appearance and decide to end the series with a viewers' choice of contestants, but this time they want to ensure that Amanda is chosen to draw viewers in to the second series where they will show the outcome of the date. So they stack the odds and get the grumpy scriptwriter, a frustrated author called Jack, to be the male contestant, on the proviso that he picks Amanda, by bribing him with a three day trip to Santorini as the prize.
Can three nights in Santorini turn enemies into lovers, or at least friends?
Meanwhile, Amanda's agent has signed her up as a blogger for a man-hating website and is pushing hard for her next book to be about revenge, whereas Amanda feels her first book was cathartic enough and can't summon enough venom to suit her agent. Is she just a one-hit wonder and what will Amanda do to further her career.
I really enjoyed this. Its nice to have a fifty-year old MC, even if TBH she could just have easily been thirty or forty years old, no embarrassing hot flushes for her. The story could have gone in several ways, but as befitting more mature MCs there was no histrionic misunderstanding. I will look out for the previous book in this series.
I received an ARC from the publisher Tule in return for an honest review.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment