My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes

This past weekend the weather has been blisteringly hot and the only thing to do was spend most of the day reading in the shade, and this was the perfect book for the occasion. It's an unashamedly girlie book, set in Ireland, with plenty of colourful characters to add a layer of fun. I haven't read anything by Marian Keyes before, but the woman is obviously a machine as this book was over five hundred pages long, and she has quite an extensive back catalogue that I suspect are much the same size.

It's a love story around the 'will she, won't she' theme, as Anna spends a large chunk of her life alternately falling in love with Joey or hating the very ground he walks on. Fate brings them together at intervals, and in between their meetings they both have other serious relationships that change everything about their lives, and for these two at least, the path of true love is never straight.

I liked the fact that we meet Anna in her late forties, just as she enters the peri-menopause, and her experience of dealing with that will be very relatable to a lot of women. In fact, the majority of characters are around middle age, and as well as their current relationships, everyone has a back story, and nobody has got into their forties without a few battle scars.

As well as the romantic threads, there are some wonderful sections describing family relationships in Anna's large family. As with many big families, they argue constantly but will do anything for each other without question. They also insist on showing up in numbers if they think something is going on that they don't want to miss, and they enjoy pulling everyone into the fun whether they like it or not.

This is not the kind of book to win the Booker Prize but it is still very well written and very enjoyable. It is the perfect book for reading by the pool on holiday and you will want to pass it on to a friend when you've finished. It's not a best seller for nothing!

Comments

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