#Review: A Million Dreams by Dani Atkins @AtkinsDani @HoZ_Books #blogtour #newrelease #womensfiction

A real pleasure today to be joining the blog tour and sharing my review of A Million Dreams by Dani Atkins, published by Head of Zeus on 14th November. You’ll find it for kindle and in hardback via Amazon, and the e-book is available for Kobo, via iBooks, and from Google Play. The audiobook will be available on 5th December, and the paperback will follow on 7th May next year. My thanks to Vicky at Head of Zeus for the invitation to join the tour, and for my advance reading copy (provided via netgalley).

I haven’t read a book by Dani Atkins before – I’ve certainly wanted to, when I’ve seen the wonderful reviews, and every single one is sitting on my kindle. In 2018, This Love won the Romantic Novel of the Year award – then While I Was Sleeping followed, and I still couldn’t manage to fit in the reading. So I’m particularly delighted that, at long last, I’ve discovered for myself the reason why the author’s books are so very much loved by everyone who reads them.

Beth Brandon always dreamed of owning a florist, but today the bouquets of peonies and bright spring flowers are failing to calm her nerves. Because today, Beth has a life-changing decision to share with her husband.

 

Izzy Vaughan thought she and her husband would stay together forever, but sometime last year, their love began to fade. They both find such joy in their young son Noah – but is he enough to keep them together?

 

Eight years ago, something happened to these two women. Something that is about to bring them together in a way no-one thought possible…

 

Thought-provoking, emotional and uplifting, this is a gripping love story for fans of Jojo Moyes and Amanda Prowse.

It’s very unlike me, but this review will be a short one. I found this book absolutely enchanting, quite beautifully written, impossible to put down and immensely uplifting – in fact, I finished reading it at 3am one morning because I just couldn’t bear to leave its characters behind. And if you read with your heart – as I always do – you’re going to love it every bit as much as I did. But it’s a tremendously difficult book to review: the life-changing decisions, the incident eight years previously that had such a cataclysmic impact and reverberations through the characters’ lives, the moral issues and the way they respond to them, really need to hit every reader with the same hammer blow that I felt as I was reading.

The characters became entirely real to me, the issues they grappled with keeping me awake at night: I cried for them, sometimes laughed with them, felt their moments of joy and their excruciating pain, wanted to do something – anything – to make life work out for them all in the way they deserved. There are no cliches, no predictability – no sooner are you stunned by one turn of the story than another comes along, tightening that emotional screw, wondering how much more these poor people can stand. But it’s all so very cleverly done: you never, ever, feel manipulated, just that you’re watching people’s lives unfolding through the pages. Motherhood, loss and love are at the book’s core – and I thought it was simply stunning.

About the author

Dani Atkins is an award-winning novelist. Her 2013 debut Fractured (published as Then and Always in North America) has been translated into sixteen languages and has sold more than half a million copies since first publication in the UK. Dani is the author of four other bestselling novels, one of which, This Love, won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2018. Dani lives in a small village in Hertfordshire with her husband, one Siamese cat and a very soppy Border Collie.

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