Nice Work, Nora November by Julia LondonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Nora November nearly drowned, in fact she was clinically dead for a few minutes. When she emerges from her coma she decides she needs to do things differently, to really live her life now that she has a second chance, so she creates a reverse bucket list of things she wants to do after she (technically) died.
She wants to make peace with the memory of her late grandfather by tending his garden patch (allotment) which she has shamefully neglected since his death. She wants to learn to cook, to be a better friend to her sister Lacey and to her cousin Gus, who struggles with addiction. She wants to find the guy she met in a corner shop during a robbery and reconnect, she wants to start playing sport again. But most of all, she wants to leave her soul-destroying job at her family's personal injury law firm where her father has dictated her life.
Jack Moriarity is a hospice and palliative nurse, helping those with incurable diseases take their final breaths. Although it is his calling, he finds the deaths can take an emotional toll. One of his patients left him a plot of the local community garden and Jack has found it therapeutic to garden. He regrets losing the number of the woman he met at a convenience store one night, they really connected in a way he's never felt before.
So we see Nora and Jack leading parallel lives, always close but never quite managing to meet, while Nora attempts to put her reverse bucket list into action. But things never go quite to plan and she is in imminent danger of slipping back into her former depression, especially when her parents refuse to acknowledge the truth about her accident.
This was a weird book for me to review, not least because I had imagined that this was more of a romance than women's fiction, which having reread the blurb was 100% my own imagination. It was very slow, at about 85% on my Kindle everything was still going wrong. And yet ... it rang true, far truer than a romance where everything would miraculously work out perfectly in the end. Overall, it wasn't what I thought it was going to be, but I enjoyed it.
I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.
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