Annabel Giles (1959–2023)

An enjoyably warm and irreverent narrative describing a middle-class single mum's gentle desperation, attempted suicide and road to recovery which all rings true, but never becomes depressing as it is peppered with episodes of real comic timing, love, passion, temper and redecorating.. a bit like real life, really.

This novel is aptly described by the heroine, Tessa, who is reading a book while she sun bathes, "She'd got a bit further on with the book, which was turning out to be much better than she'd thought, having been written by some D-list celebrity, probably trying to revive her flagging career."

Tessa books a package holiday to spend time with her teenage daughter, but doesn't see much of her and ends up going on a voyage of self-discovery. It sounds horribly cliché but I was pleasantly show more surprised. Things get more interesting when she meets Felicity, whose brother-in-law is the resort manager of Seaside Villages, and the women develop the platonic equivalent of a holiday romance. At first I felt that the characters were more caricatures, but the author approaches this novel with good humour and Austenian sense of irony which meant they were consistent and, ultimately, convincing. The development of the relationships between the characters in this microcosm was really well done, but one criticism would be that the novel uses these relationships to tackle too many 'issues'. I found the writing style to be rather annoying at first but I think in the end it was successful in conveying the atmosphere of the institution that is The Package Holiday.

This book isn't bad for a quick read, despite being a bit of a no-brainer. Unapologetic chick-lit through and through. I would recommend it for holidays in the sun mainly because I ended up thoroughly sickened by the rubbish weather that I had to put up with in comparison! show less

I somewhat liked this book. The blurp was intriging and I started reading it enthusiasticly. I was very curious how the six birthdays would be interconnected, and thought it a nice concept of connecting six seperate stories.

However, from the second birthday on the stories became a drag to read. Except for little Scarlet I didn't find any of the characters nice enough to actually care what would happen to them.

I would have stopped reading if I didn't want to find out how everything would be show more connected in the end. However, the "big twist" was very obvious and unfulfilling. show less

I've read the first section about the little girl who has to go to hospital with appendicitis on her birthday, but I don't feel enthusiastic about reading the rest of the book, so it's going back on my Available pile.