The Longest Holiday

by Paige Toon, Thomas Judd, and Esther Wane

[Leah]

Paige Toon is one of my favourite Chick Lit authors, ever. Second only to Sophie Kinsella. I adore her novels. They’re amazing. However, I wasn’t as enamoured with One Perfect Summer, her last novel, so I was a teensy bit worried about her new one The Longest Holiday. I was thrilled at the idea of Laura getting her own story – she was a background character in Chasing Daisy, and it was nice to get to know more about her. I was also thrilled Matthew from One Perfect Summer was also reappearing. Paige does that the best of all the Chick Lit authors out there – she manages to inhabit her characters all in the same world and to get updates on previous characters in newer books are awesome, because you feel like the characters are real people.

The Longest Holiday sees Paige Toon back on form. This is the Paige Toon from Chasing Daisy, from Pictures of Lily, from pretty much all her novels except One Perfect Summer, and it took me a mere four or five hours to complete it, all in one sitting. Laura has been married for 7 months to Matthew, seemingly the perfect husband, until she finds out he made a horrific error in judgement, and in a bid to forget about her wrecked life, her best friend Marty drags her off on a holiday to Florida, to Key West. When Laura arrives in Key West, she loves it – nights filled with alcohol and her best friends, a distraction in the form a sexy scuba-diver intructor, Leo, and Laura realises she doesn’t want to go home when there’s nothing really waiting for her in rainy old England. So she decides to stay, but is Leo just a holiday fling or is it the real deal?

I loved The Longest Holiday! I really did. I loved the Florida setting (if I won the lottery there’s a 99% chance I’d move to Florida for good, I LOVE Florida), I loved hearing about the Key West, a bit of Florida I’ve never visited but am now desperate to. I really loved Laura. We never got to know much of her in Chasing Daisy, because the novel wasn’t about her, she was Will’s girlfriend but there weren’t many scenes with her in, so it was really interesting for her to get her own novel and I very much enjoyed getting to know her. I felt so sad for her, having known previously what had happened with Will, and then learning what Matthew did, she was very much a character you could call unlucky-in-love. I always love novels where characters escape their normal lives, and seeing Laura escape – and stay – in the Key West was awesome. I loved Leo, Jorge, Carmen, and the house they stayed in (I’ve never known a house be such an important aspect to a book but it was!). There were some really amazing characters in the novel, and it was a pleasure to get to know them all.

My only complaint about The Longest Holiday and it didn’t detract from the book, it’s merely a personal observation, but I felt sad for Matthew. I loved Matthew in One Perfect Summer, and I felt he was underutilised in The Longest Holiday, being cast in the bad guy role. That’s it. Like I said, personal observation. Apart from that I adored the book. As I said previously, this is Toon at her best. She’s one of the finest, sharpest Chick Lit writers around and I wish she’d write more books – something that’s coming true next year when she’ll be publishing two novels, her regular Chick Lit novel plus a new Young Adult series starring Johnny Jefferson’s teenage daughter that he had no idea about! I’m so excited. You have to read The Longest Holiday, it’s the perfect summer read, and I’m sad it’s over. It was written so, so well – Toon is one of my favourite writers, and never disappoints. This was a brilliant, brilliant read, and as always with a Paige Toon book, I loved the romance, loved the love story. Read it, it’s fab!