Title: Happy Ever After
Author: C C MacDonald
Publisher: Vintage
Synopsis:
On the outside it looks like Naomi has everything. A beautiful daughter, a gorgeous house on the Kent coast, a perfect life. But in reality, Naomi’s husband is depressed, their house is still a building site, and they are struggling to conceive their second child.
Then Naomi meets a parent at her daughter’s nursery. Sean seems to understand her. Looking for a connection, for a friend, she joins him at a swimming lesson with their children. That day, in a moment of madness, she makes a terrible mistake. Weeks later, Naomi discovers she is pregnant.
She decides she must give her marriage a chance, and is determined to end things with Sean. But when she tries to contact him, he has disappeared without a trace. As she tries to piece her life back together, someone else wants to make sure she never forgets what she did that day.
Will that day cost Naomi her Happy Ever After?
My review:
Happy Ever After is an entertaining psychological thriller that focuses on Naomi and her husband Charlie. They have a baby, Prue, but Naomi is evidently feeling a little bored with her life and ends up doing something very stupid with someone who turns out to be nothing like what they seem.
The characters were not likable for me – I struggled to identify or empathise with the demanding Naomi, though I felt sorry for her at times, and her husband Charlie was irritating in his own way! Despite this, I wanted to know exactly who certain characters really were, and there are sections of the book which seem to feature teenagers talking, and it added an extra sense of mystery – I wanted to know who these people were ands how they related to the story.
There were lots of predictable elements to this book, and some you could see coming a mile off, but despite this I found myself racing through it. There are certainly parts which felt unrealistic, but then again, that just adds to the entertainment value.
Naomi has plenty of faults, but at the end of the day I wanted to know what would happen to her and her family, so I kept reading on, and the book certainly provided entertainment, so I’d recommend it if you fancy something easy and fun to read.