Ivy Lane

by Cathy Bramley

[Leah]

Cathy Bramley is a new author to the Chick Lit world but has somewhat burst on to the scene over the past year with her fabulous Ivy Lane series! Each season has brought a new chapter in Tilly and Ivy Lane’s life, and finally in February we got the whole book together (can I get a woot woot?) which meant that I could finally give it a read! I’d actually already read “Spring” so I skipped straight to “Summer” and got on with reading the final three seasons, curious to know where Tilly’s life would lead and wanting to know more than I ever expected about having an allotment and growing vegetables!

Ivy Lane was such an enjoyable book to get myself stuck in to. It’s the kind of novel where the place really comes to life, with characters larger-than-life and it really feels like you’re part of the community, which is pretty awesome and something I aspire to, even though I’m actually the most unsocial person you will ever likely meet. (For reals. I put Sheldon Cooper to shame.) I absolutely loved getting to know all the wonderful characters at Ivy Lane and I actually really loved learning about having a gardening plot to take care of (my Uncle has one and I love his peapods, but that’s as far as my gardening skills go – eating the food!) and if I lived in England I’d definitely be scoping out an allotment somewhere, hoping to meet just as good a bunch of characters as I did in Ivy Lane.

Tilly was such an interesting character, who clearly had a very sad story to tell that we don’t learn for ages. Yes, I had mostly figured it out by the time she told us thanks to the helpful little hints from Cathy Bramley, but it was nice to finally hear it in Tilly’s words, as it was her story to tell and it was sad, and it made me understand exactly why she had changed her life completely and ended up in Ivy Lane, alone and not knowing just how much the folks there would help change her life. I wasn’t 100% sold on Tilly’s love story, if only because I never felt like we really got to know Adian; I felt he just needed a bit more to him, because he seemed a bit 2D to me. But I loved Tilly’s best friend Gemma (although her tendency to end every sentence with “dot com” was really, really grating) and sweet old Alf. Oh, how Alf stole my heart. I’m so looking forward to Cathy’s next series (though not so much having to wait probably a year to read it, sob, as I don’t do serials because I can barely remember whole books I read, hehe). Ivy Lane was a winner!