Digital Reads Reviews

Many thanks to Emma and Damp Pebbles Blog Tours for my spot on this Blog Tour.

A different kind of a story with a sprinkle of romance, nostalgia, happiness and sadness. Just like life. The story spanned the past and the present and made way for the possibility of a future.

Arden had an affair with a professor Mac who was a classic movie buff. Cut to the present time, she saw a man on the hospital bed who resembled Mac. He had a stroke and aphasia and could talk only in phrases. All of them were from the movies he saw with Arden during their short affair.

My first book by Fiona Collins, it was fun to read the present and get the visuality of the past through Arden’s memories. I loved how the author showed me happiness and love for the old classics. There was something so special when the characters remembered the dialogues. I got to see the kaleidoscope of their life together, in all colors.

The author’s writing made me smile, and emotions gathered in me when I learned about Arden’s life in the present. Quite a contrast from the effervescent girl she was. I loved how the author got her out of the shell slowly down the pages, and I got to see the woman who had found her joie de vivre.

All shades of life were sensitively dealt with by the author. There was much to smile about, some to cry and frown. But it was all about letting go of past and living life completely in the present, finding the small joys in life.

I downloaded the digital copy of the book from an online retailer, and this is my journey into its pages, straight from the heart!! STRICTLY HONEST AND UNBIASED.

All my reviews can be read here

He only speaks in movie references but they make her remember everything…

After a marriage which threatened her entire sense of self, Arden Hall is divorced, doing a lacklustre job and living a quiet, rather unexciting life. But one day, visiting a friend in a London hospital, she suddenly re-encounters her former lover from thirty years ago, charismatic Film Studies lecturer, Mac Bartley-Thomas, who is lying in a bed on the same ward.

Suffering from a brain injury and unable to converse, all Mac can utter is short references to the famous films he and Arden once watched together, back when she was a student and they conducted their affair: Casablanca, Bonnie and Clyde, Some Like It Hot and more…

These movies spark both bittersweet memories of their passionate relationship and the potential for a more reflective Arden to finally fulfil the promise of her younger self. And in the course of her visits to Mac, she starts to reconnect with the world in a way that she didn’t think was possible…

Publication Date: April 2019