MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

The book starts with a random chapter about a woman giving birth, that seems to have no relevance to anything else. I found myself wondering if the midwife was going to be Athene perhaps, or Vivi. But it turned out to be a man who only enters the story about a third of the way through.

There were one or two other random chapters like that, which I presume were supposed to be the stories for the life story things at the shop. But overall I found the way the book was put together to be very disjointed

The blurb on the back is misleading because it makes it sound like the book is very much about Athene and Suzanna, but I did feel Athene to be an almost secondary character because she's hardly in the story, and even Suzanna is overshadowed by other characters at times. And I thought Suzanna was an unlikeable character really.

I didn't think it was very plausible that throughout her life, nobody had let slip to Suzanna about the circumstances of her birth, and that she only found out when Mrs Creek mentioned it.

I did love the sound of The Peacock Emporium though - it sounded like a lovely little shop.

Reading this hasn't made me want to read any more of JoJo Moyes' books, but there were parts of it that I did like. ( )