Review: 'The Idea of You' by Amanda Prowse (2017)

With her fortieth birthday approaching, Lucy Carpenter dares to hope that she finally has it all: a wonderful new husband, Jonah, a successful career and the chance of a precious baby of her own. Life couldn’t be more perfect.
But the reality of becoming parents proves much harder than Lucy and Jonah imagined. Jonah’s love and support is unquestioning, but as Lucy struggles with work and her own failing dreams, the strain on their marriage increases. Suddenly it feels like Lucy is close to losing everything…
I consider myself lucky to once again be one of the bloggers to have received an early review copy of author Amanda Prowse’s latest release. ‘The Idea of You’ promised to be another engrossing read by this author who has slowly but surely become one of my favourite women’s fiction authors, and it was definitely one of this month’s releases I was most excited about picking up. Over the past few years I’ve read and reviewed several other books by this author, such as ‘My Husband’s Wife’, ‘Another Love’, ‘A Mother’s Story’ and most recently ‘The Food of Love’, and one thing all of these books have in common is that I gave them high ratings. I was pretty sure this latest release would not disappoint, but you never know until you give it a try…!
It might have taken slightly longer than she initially expected but with her fortieth birthday slowly approaching, Lucy Carpenter seems to have everything she ever wanted. Well, almost everything. Jonah is a wonderful husband, she has a great job she enjoys, and together they have a lovely home. But there’s one thing that would complete their perfect picture and that’s a child of her own. However, this turns out to be slightly more difficult than both Lucy and Jonah anticipated. When Jonah’s teenage daughter Camille comes to stay with them for the summer, Lucy is keen to make it an enjoyable experience for all of them, but the strain on her and Jonah’s marriage only seems to get worse, and before she knows it everything she worked hard to build up is at risk…
In this latest novel by best-selling women’s fiction author Amanda Prose ‘family’ and ‘parenthood’ are the two keywords. We are introduced to Lucy, who is at a wonderful stage in her life, having found her true love and trying to make a baby together. This, however, turns out to be the start of an incredibly difficult period; a period in which both she and her husband Jonah will be tested and will need to work incredibly hard to make it to the other side alive. Once again Amanda Prowse succeeds in portraying an ordinary woman, an ordinary family, and she takes the reader behind closed doors, where all kinds of emotions and pain are slowly taking over. The feelings are incredibly real, and with her easy-flowing but engrossing writing style she makes it a true challenge to not feel for the characters and what they are going through.
Amanda Prowse is an author that treats her readers to a new novel almost every six months, and while you would expect this to perhaps affect the quality of the books, I can honestly say it doesn’t; she really just is a born story-teller. Each read is just as well-written and touching as the previous one, and I can only applaud her for her consistency. While this particular novel isn’t one of my personal Amanda Prowse favourites (I thought it was just a bit slow-paced at times and I had some difficulty really connecting with the topic, perhaps because I don’t have any children yet), it was still a wonderful read. ‘The Idea of You’ is another absorbing and well-written novel that will make you feel all kinds of things; if you’re a women’s fiction fan and not yet familiar with this author, be sure to pick this up because you are really missing out on something!

Rating:8,5/10

  For more information about this book: Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com / Goodreads
Thanks to the author for providing me with a review copy in exchange for an honest review.