I’m really delighted today to be joining the blog tour (on its final day) and sharing my review of Promise Me by Jill Mansell. Published by Headline Review on 19th January, it’s now available in hardcover, on all major e-book platforms, and as an audiobook, with the paperback to follow in June. My thanks to the publishers for my advance reading e-copy (provided via netgalley), and to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for the invitation and support.
When I last reviewed one of Jill’s wonderful books I mentioned that it had been a while – and I’m quite mortified that I’ve let it happen again, because that review was back in 2019 (of Maybe This Time – I really loved it, and you’ll find my review here). You’ll find loads of reviews of Jill’s earlier books if you pop her name into my search bar – and I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that her first novel Fast Friends (way back in 1991!) was the book that started my love affair with romance. So many great books later, she’s still one of the very best, and I was so pleased to be able to set aside some time to read her latest… let’s take a closer look…
Fate’s about to make mischief…
One minute Lou is happily employed, with a perfect flat. The next, her home and job have gone. Suddenly she has to start over.
The last thing Lou wants is to move to a tiny Cotswolds village. She certainly doesn’t intend to work for curmudgeonly eighty-year-old Edgar Allsopp. But Edgar is about to make her the kind of promise nobody could ignore. In return, she secretly vows to help him fall in love with life again.
Foxwell is also home to Remy, whose charm and charisma are proving hard to ignore. But Lou hasn’t recovered from the last time she fell for a charmer. She needs a distraction – and luckily one’s about to turn up.
Secrets never stay hidden for long in Foxwell, nor are promises always kept. And no one could guess what lies ahead…
While visiting her musician friend Sammy in the Cotswolds village of Foxwell, Lou’s path crosses with that of Edgar – eighty years old, rude, demanding, and one of those people that the word “curmudgeon” was made for. She gives as good as she gets, but always with a warm and genuine smile – and, when she returns home to Birmingham, he plagues her with phone calls asking her to return and take on being his carer, a job he’s (unsurprisingly!) finding it particularly hard to fill. But when she unexpectedly finds herself homeless and jobless, and he puts a more substantial offer on the table, she finds she needs to reconsider her options – and returns to Foxwell, working for Edgar while making it her mission to bring some joy into his life. She has some unexpected help with that from Captain Oates, a particularly characterful rescue dog who rather shares Edgar’s approach to life – but then everything starts to go wrong when she helps him reconnect with Della, the former love of his life, who turns out to have an agenda all of her own.
The characters in this book are just wonderful. Lou herself is immensely likeable – a constant ray of sunshine, making friends wherever she goes, nothing about life ever getting her down – and her developing relationship with a slowly thawing Edgar particularly warms the heart. The supporting characters are fantastic too, the whole community Lou becomes very much part of, and her special friends: I had a particular soft spot for Sammy, whose search for stardom has a well developed thread of its own, surreal at times and extremely funny, but very touching too. And then there are Lou’s romantic interests – she’s rather given up on being seen as anything but a mate by Sammy’s (rather gorgeous) brother Remy, but a new arrival in the village might just make her throw caution to the wind as her heart begins to beat a little faster. The baddies of the piece are every bit as well drawn, their behaviour self-centred and totally atrocious – you really hope for some comeuppance to come their way, and a happy ending for the characters you’ve taken to your heart, but at times there seems very little chance of that.
It’s a fantastic story, quite wonderfully told – and I read it from cover to cover in a single sitting, caring deeply for its main characters, totally invested in the way things would turn out for them all. At times there were tears, but there was also a lot of laughter – and the ending was just about as perfect as it could possibly have been. Emotionally engaging, joyful and uplifting – I really loved it.
About the author
Jill Mansell has been writing Sunday Times bestsellers for over twenty years, most recently Should I Tell You? Her hobbies include exploring the Cotswolds and the south west of England, scouting for locations for future books, and discovering brilliant new restaurants along the way. She lives in Bristol with her family.
Jill keeps in touch with her readers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram: you can also visit her website.
Fast Friends hooked me too! Bought it at a train station when just married. X
Such brilliant characters in this book.
Thanks for the blog tour support x