After The Honeymoon by Janey Fraser

After The Honeymoon by Janey Fraser
Buy After The Honeymoon by Janey Fraser at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Women's Fiction
Reviewer: Zoe Page
Summary: A thoroughly entertaining look at a couple of couples, and some hanger-on-ers, as they embark on their honeymoons are future lives together. Massively recommended.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 496	Date: May 2014
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 978-0099580843
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A TV star and his make-up artist wife, and a dinner lady and her husband are not two couples you would expect to end up honeymooning at the same place, but through a twist of fate (ok, a teacher at the school one works at and the other sends her kids to) both women and their new husbands end up on the same secluded Greek island at the same time. It’s run by a British woman who left for the continent 15 years ago, and it’s the perfect spot to get away from it all, be it your toddler's safely left with grandma, or the paparazzi who are desperate for an exclusive.

Though called After The Honeymoon, this story covers both the holiday itself and the return home, and each period of time is full of unexpected surprises. For Emma and Tom, the holiday shows they may not know each other as well as they thought, while for Winston and Melissa, it’s clear there are different priorities at stake.

This is a great piece of writing and I loved every word. The style, the pace, the characters, the humour, all are spot on and made it a pleasure to read. It’s a genre – chicklit – than many try to do, but few pull off which such grace.

It’s a comedy of errors with food poisoning and travel sickness, Greek Lotharios and secrets from the past, a couple of nudists and some accidental smuggling. There’s a lot going on but it all makes sense and is within context, and it’s all great fun.

I found the characters grew and changed throughout the book. The once whiny Emma comes into her own once she’s out of the country, while Winston regresses in my eyes and I was disappointed with how things ended with him. To be clear, I was disappointed in his behaviour, not in how the author treated him. That’s what it felt like: as if these were real characters with minds of their own.

I really enjoyed this book and didn’t want it to end. There were some things that seemed inevitable as the story unfolded, but it wasn’t, in the end, that predictable. I also liked the imagery of the Greek island and it made me feel as if I was on the set of Mamma Mia, a welcome respite from the current rain here.

An all round good read, my thanks go to the publishers for supplying this book.

Happy Families and The Playgroup by the same author also come highly recommended.

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