New start, new love. That's what Honor Sontag needs after her life falls apart, leaving her reputation in tatters and her head all over the place. So she flees her native America and heads for Brighton, England. Honor's hoping for a much-deserved break and the chance to find the mother who abandoned her as a baby. What she gets is an entanglement with a mysterious male whose family seems to have a finger in every pot in town. Martyn Mayfair has sworn off women with strings attached, but is irresistibly drawn to Honor, the American who keeps popping up in his life. All he wants is an uncomplicated relationship built on honesty, but Honor's past threatens to undermine everything. When secrets about her mother start to spill out ...Honor has to make an agonising choice. Will she live up to her dutiful name and please others? Or will she choose freedom? From the best selling author of Starting Over, this novel has great charm and a cast of unforgettable characters.
For some reason I just couldn't get into this book at all. The premise is interesting enough, sure, but it's just not executed well enough for me. The beginning didn't grab me at all, and I must admit, I was struggling to carry on after 20 pages. I made it to 50 proper pages and then I started skimming, because nothing was happening. I was expecting Honor to start looking for her mother, as the blurb suggests but she does nothing for the first 100 pages except... well, nothing. She finds a job, she goes sight-seeing, she nearly burns to death, nothing that kept me hooked.
Because the book wasn't going anywhere for me, I decided to skip ahead to see who Honor's mother turned out to be and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of who her mother turned out to be. There's fiction and then there's jumping the shark. If I had kept reading and found out who Honor's mother was that way I'd have been angry, because it's stupid. It's like a one of those made for TV movies.
I feel rather disappointed. From the beautiful cover featuring Brighton Pier I expected a lot more. It's rare I don't finish books but if I'd tried to finish this it'd have taken me weeks. Both of the Sue Moorcroft novels I've read now haven't been entirely to my taste, so I probably won't pick up her books in the future. For some reason they just don't agree with me.
