The Accidental Family by Rowan Coleman

The Accidental Family by Rowan Coleman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Time taken to read - 2 days

Pages - 416

Publisher - Arrow Books

Source - Bought

Blurb from Goodreads

A wonderfully warm and witty novel about starting again, from the author of The Memory Book.

Six months ago, city girl Sophie Mills gave up everything to move to Cornwall. All to be with the man she thinks she loves, and his two daughters who she knows she loves.

But adjusting to life as a semi-permanent mother in the countryside isn't quite as easy as Sophie imagined it would be. Designer shoes aren't nearly so readily available - not that she ever has any occasion to wear them - and her best pair of vintage Manolo's have already found their way into the girls' dressing-up box. Sometimes Sophie doesn't recognise herself; which most of the time makes her happy but every now and then scares her to death.

The hardest thing of all is making that final commitment to actually move in with Louis and the girls - she's been the longest paying guest of the Avalon B&B, St Ives in the history of the establishment. And as she tries to adapt to country life, her newly adopted family and discovering more about Louis's past, she begins to wonder if she's got what it takes to make it all work ...



My Review

It says book two on here but according to FantasticFiction this is book 3, I hadn't read the first two so this was my introduction to all the characters. So Sophie moved from everything she knew and loved for Louis and his two little girls. As I hadn't read the previous books I had quite a lot of catching up to do, for example the weans mum who died had been Sophie's bestie :O Louis is her husband (they were estranged ad he ran out on her and the kids after an affair), when she died Sophie had been left to care for the kids, he came back and they fell in love. Obvs there is a lot more to it but that woulda been covered in books 1 and 2. Anyways Sophie has issues fully commiting/moving in but all that will change when they are committed to each other and the weans can't wait. However when something from Louise's past comes to the forefront everything is turned on its head and Sophie isn't too sure where she stands.

I think my problem is Louis went from being super focused/in love and seemingly perfect to quite a character turn and I really didn't like him. I wanted Sophie to get a backbone and Wendy needed high fived in the face with a chair lol.

It has drama galore, perfect for poolside reading with my pina colada, I absolutely felt for those wee girls, they were absolute scones and you just wanted to hug them. They seemed quite mature for their age but they had lost their mum and had a lot of change in a short time period and I think it is a credit to the author to sculpt their characters to reflect that in their behaviours/attitudes.

A wee bit car crash tv, you didn't want to put the book down because you wanted to see what was coming next. I can't say I loved the characters, I found them to be infuriating at times but a bad character is open a good pull into the story. 3.5/5 for me, I would read the previous books if I came across them but I don't feel the need to go get them, I would be interested in a book 4 of these though.

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