Blog Tour and Review : The Food of Love by Amanda Prowse

The Very Pink Notebook is overwhelmingly thrilled to be part of Amanda Prowse's, 

The Food of Love, blog tour this week.  With much thanks to Amanda for involving me in the tour and for a copy of the book.

Published by - Lake Union Publishing

1 December 2016

Copy - ARC copy received from author

The Blurb

A loving mother. A perfect family. A shock wave that could shatter everything.

Freya Braithwaite knows she is lucky. Nineteen years of marriage to a man who still warms her soul and two beautiful teenage daughters to show for it: confident Charlotte and thoughtful Lexi. Her home is filled with love and laughter.

But when Lexi’s struggles with weight take control of her life, everything Freya once took for granted falls apart, leaving the whole family with a sense of helplessness that can only be confronted with understanding, unity and, above all, love.

In this compelling and heart-wrenching new work by bestselling author Amanda Prowse, one ordinary family tackles unexpected difficulties and discovers that love can find its way through life’s darkest moments.

The Very Pink Notebook Review

It is a lovely thing, to be asked to review a book, but when the author is one of your long time favourites it becomes quite an event.  For me, being asked to be involved in Amanda Prowse's blog tour for The Food of Love, is one of those times.

Often reviewers will say they felt a little anxious at the start of a favourite authors new book, what if it isn't as good as those that have gone before it?  I had no such concerns with this book, just from the blurb I could tell that Amanda had honed in on yet another harrowing topic, which she would raise awareness of by her tried and tested successful format of writing a novel about a women's fight for her family.

The particular fight for the protagonist in this novel, Freya, is against the illness that blights her youngest daughter, Lexi.  Anorexia.  This is not an easy book to read, there is no light-hearted streak running through it, there is no miraculous or unrealistic resolutions, it is full on with emotion and heart-ache and anguish.  But it is brilliant.  The characters are so fully formed and developed your heart feels heavy for them and you find yourself rooting for them to just stay strong, to stick together. 

For me, this book was a real eye opener.  You know the author has thoroughly researched the subject matter and novel gives a realistic impression of life for those where anorexia permeates every waking (and sleeping) moment.  It shows how long term the illness is, how hard it is to find the crux and core to it, which without knowing makes it almost impossible to start to fight it.  Although written from the view point of Freya, the mother I felt I got a really full insight into how it affected all the main characters, Lexi herself, her father, Lockie, and sister Charlotte.  The scene that made me break the barriers and shed a tear was a very moving, but simple gesture between the two sisters. 

The format Amanda has used keeps the story moving along at a good pace and, as always, the narrative and dialogue is fluent and easy to read, making the book extremely hard to put down.  It didn't quite go where I thought it was going to go when I first started reading which was a lovely surprise.

Amanda Prowse says herself, she has found her talent and that is being able to write books, very quickly.  And knowing how frequently she publishes it always amazes me just how deep and developed the characters are and how detailed and well researched the plot is for the timescale she must give herself to work to.  This book is another example of how well this is done by this author.

The last thing for me to say isn't actually to do with the plot, but I feel it deserves mention so no one misses it :   READ THE AUTHORS NOTE.   

The Food of Love of course gets a Very Pink Notebook rating of :

     

About the Author

Amanda Prowse is a bestselling novelist with an incredible 136K followers on Twitter. This is her sixteenth novel and her books have been translated into a dozen languages and regularly top bestseller charts all over the world. Amanda has been dubbed ‘The Queen of Domestic Drama’ and writes about ordinary women and their families who find their strength, courage and love tested in ways they never imagined.

Through writing The Food of Love, Amanda has come face to face with her own feelings of shame, secrecy and obsession with food. Overweight as a child and a yo-yo dieter as an adult, Amanda has struggled with body image and overeating all her life.

She now recognizes that the habits of her once anorexic mother had a profound effect on her growing up. By writing about eating disorders in The Food of Love, Amanda has faced her own food demons and has made incredible steps to correcting her unhealthy relationship with food. Since she started writing the book, Amanda has lost one and a half stone and aims to reach her target, healthy weight by 1^st December, the publication date of The Food of Love.

Follow the Tour

The tour continues tomorrow so I am passing the baton on to www.karensworld-writer.co.uk