Happy Tuesday everyone. It’s absolutely roasting hot here so it seems fitting that this week’s pick is summary book with a lot of wandering around Paris and lovely weather
I mentioned The Paris Match on the day that it came out but just a recap for you of the plot: it’s about Layla, who is going to Paris for the wedding of her ex’s sister. Layla has been like a sister to the bride but now she’s divorced the bride’s brother and this is the first test of the “amicable” part of their divorce and whether she can still be part of the family now she’s not officially in it any more. After a night out with the bride and her best friend, the bride decides she wants to break off the wedding and tells her fiancé it’s because of something Layla said. Thus Griffin, the best man, turns up at her room door and tells her she’s got to fix it. And so here starts Layla and Griffin trying to fix what’s gone wrong with the potential bride and groom for their own different reasons and in doing that they get to know each other and maybe fall in love.
This isn’t an all hearts and flowers book and that’s one of the things that I really liked about it. There’s some pretty serious backstory going on for both characters: Layla has her divorce and Griff has got some chronic illness and chronic pain that he’s dealing with. And a real feature of the book is how he moves through the world and how he is perceived in the world. But despite what you might think after reading that, it’s not super heavy or miserable read. And actually one of the things I really like about Kate Clayborn – and she’s done this in other books – is the way that she can manage to have quite serious subjects in the character’s lives and their back stories and yet the books don’t feel like it’s heavy or a slog. It just feels delightful watching these two people find each other and and fall in love – and not be fixed by their relationship per se but their lives made better by it. And I really found that with this.
I basically read it in about a day – I started it one night and finished it the next afternoon which speaks to how much I enjoyed it. I was gonna save it for a time of need but it turns out the time of need came a little bit sooner than I was expecting and I regret nothing about that decision. I love Paris and I loved watching Griff and Layla move around Paris and recognise bits of my experience. Paris is such a great city a great setting for this and works so well with the story. If I have any complaints it’s that I wanted a bit more comeuppance at the end for some people that have done the hero with heroine wrong, but I can live with it because I think that the ending that the characters got was pretty perfect.
This should be a fairly easy one to find. I had the paperback pre-ordered but the Kindle is actually on offer at 99p this month and I’m impressed with myself for resisting the urge to buy a Kindle copy as well as my paperbacks so I could read it while I was away from home so you should be able to get hold of this pretty much everywhere.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 