This Week ....

 

I'm reading

Can you believe that it is so close to the end of the year? We are on holidays from next week so really it feels very close. I am still getting some reading in and have a few books that I want to get read before we get to the start of 2025.

Last week I read Stuck in Second Gear by Carmen Reid which I really enjoyed. I will definitely be reading more from Carmen Reid!

For a complete change of pace, I then read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I had never read the actual book, although obviously I know the fundamentals of the story. 

I then did something I haven't done for a long time. I sat and read a book through from beginning to end in one day. The book in question was The Other Bridget by Rachael Johns. 

I then started reading The Venice Hotel by Tess Woods. I am only a few chapters in yet, but I am already intrigued. Even though there is nothing to indicate it all on the cover, this is actually set at Christmas time, so this is a good time to be reading it!



I'm watching

I didn't get as much watched this week as I have in previous weeks. 

The only Christmas movie I watched was Bringing Home Christmas. An antique store owner finds a WWII uniform and a love letter and sets about trying to find the rightful owner with the help of a military professor. It sounds like a dual timeline novel that I would have read, and it was a nice movie.

I then watched A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter. It's fair to say that I had heard of her, but I couldn't say that I know a lot about her. And I certainly didn't know who a lot of her guests were. Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed the show and I thought she was pretty entertaining! I particularly liked the duet of Last Christmas with Chappell Roan!

Life

It was a busy week activities wise!

On Tuesday night we went to an author talk featuring four chefs who all have new books out. The four chefs were Tony Tan, Alice Zablanski, Emelia Jackson and Ben Shewry. I am hoping to talk more about this night a bit more as a Weekend Cooking post soon. At least that is the plan!

On Saturday I did a cake decorating workshop, where had slice the cake, add the fillings, decorate with buttercream and then pipe the Christmas tree design on the front. It was the first time I have done a cake with this particular shop, and I will definitely do more!

And then on Saturday night, we went to see Hans - A Christmas Hootenanny. Hans is an Australian entertainer who labels himself as a German superstar. Think all the disco hits, accordion, song and dance you can handle, with a Christmas twist! It was a lot of fun.

Afterwards we joined thousands of others walking along the river bank looking at the Christmas decorations and a water, light and sound show. 

It was a very big Saturday! 

Posts from the last week


Countdown to 2025: Day 9
Top Ten Tuesday: Stormy!

Countdown to 2025: Day 10

Blog Tour: Stuck in Second Gear by Carmen Reid

Countdown to 2025: Day 11

Countdown to 2025: Day 12

Countdown to 2025: Day 13

Weekend Cooking: Advent by Anja Dunk
Countdown to 2025: Day 14
Historical Fiction Reading Challenge November Statistics
Countdown to 2025: Day 15



I've linked this post to It's Monday, what are you reading? as hosted by Book Date and Sunday Salon hosted at Readerbuzz.

Blog Tour: Stuck in Second Gear by Carmen Reid

Even when I am trying to resist the lure of too many blog tours, there is one thing that will call me. Some days I am strong enough to resist, there are some days when I just can't. When I saw the blurb for this book, my resistance was very weak. How could I resist a road trip across France?

Lucie Marshal is flabbergasted when she receives an invite to her ex-husband's wedding to a much younger influencer. How very dare he! How on earth can he even afford such a lavish event, perfectly curated for social media, when she is still paying off the debts from their acrimonious split. There is no way that she is attending this wedding.

When Lucie and Miles split, she didn't just lose a husband, she lost her interior design business, her well to do lifestyle, and there are now very distinct cracks in her relationship with her daughter Zoe. She hasn't even met the man who is the father to her soon to be born grandchild. What did she gain? Well, some debt, life in a new town closer to her ailing dad, a car that is going to cost her a fortune to repair to make it roadworthy and not much more. 

When there is a sudden train strike and all the flights are booked, Lucie's dad convinces her that she should take his old Jaguar and drive heavily pregnant Zoe to the wedding, and he will pay the costs. He also suggests to her that maybe she should try and live a little, have some fun along the way. And then her nephew Deva needs a lift too. Can anyone say road trip!

For Lucie, it would be best to just get to the wedding destination, drop Zoe and Deva off, and she can continue on to the little hotel by the sea that she has booked before making the return trip. Deva, however, is absolutely obsessed with all things Coco Chanel, and soon they are making deviations from the easy route, visiting Paris, the Auvergne region and more. I would not want to be driving a Jag into central Paris or some of the country roads in France!

Both Zoe and Deva have their own stories to be told during this road trip. Zoe's partner Rafi doesn't seem to want the same things as she does, and Deva's mother has very particular ideas of how he should live which don't equate with him living his best life!

I loved this book. I have never read Carmen Reid, but now she is on my list of authors that I have to read the backlists of! There was a lot going on in this book, what with all the events that happen as they drive across France, relationships to be repaired, with Deva taking ownership of who he really is, an influencer wedding where there is an unexpected guest and so much more. Carmen Reid does a great job of balancing the sad, the sweet, the funny moments, the joy and all the emotions in between.

I am sharing this review with the New Release Challenge hosted by The Chocolate Lady's Book Reviews. Be sure to check out other stops on the tour shown below. Thanks to the publisher, Netgalley and Rachel's Random Resources for the review copy. 

Rating 4.5/5

About the book

Stuck in Second Gear

Divorced, Re-wedded. Survived....

Lucie Marshal is absolutely furious! How did she go from being a successful wife and mother to divorced, teetering on bankruptcy, and barely speaking to her grown-up daughter? Even worse, she’s just heard that her moronic ex-husband Miles is marrying a much younger woman in an influencer-style wedding in France #blessed #theone

Lucie will absolutely NOT be going. To hell with Miles, his new teeth, new hair and new wife! She’s perfectly fine...In fact, Lucie feels lost and angry almost all of the time. Just what happened to her younger, freer wild child self, who used to live life to the full?

But then pregnant daughter Zoe needs a lift... and eccentric nephew Deva needs a lift too and now Lucie has somehow agreed to drive her Dad’s beloved old Jag all the way across France to take them to her ex-husband’s wedding.

With a pitstop in Paris, a breakdown, unexpected passengers, and miles of open road, all set to Deva’s showtunes soundtrack – could this be the journey Lucie needs to find a way back to herself?

Purchase Link - https://mybook.to/stuckinsecondgear

About the Author –

Carmen Reid is the bestselling author of numerous woman’s fiction titles including the Personal Shopper series starring Annie Valentine. After taking a break from writing she is back, introducing her hallmark feisty women characters to a new generation of readers. She lives in Glasgow with her husband and children.

Social Media Links

Facebook: @CarmenReidWrites

Twitter: @thiscarmenreid

Instagram: CarmenReidWrites

Newsletter Sign Up: https://bit.ly/CarmenReidNews

Bookbub profile: @CarmenReid3

This Week...

 

Before I jump into my normal what I'm reading, watching and doing post, I wanted to share that the 2025 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge is ready to go. 

If you love historical fiction, or if you would like to read some historical fiction in the hope that you will find some books to love, or if you love reading challenges, we would love to have you join us!

You can find out all the details here.

I'm reading

This week I didn't really get as much liked as I would have. I finished The Silver-Haired Sisterhood by Judy Leigh, which is another book set on the Isle of Skye. I seem to be reading quite a few of them at the moment. You can find my review here.

I then read Starting Over at Starlight Cottage by Debbie Viggiano who is a new author to me! I reviewed that book here.

Currently I am reading Stuck in Second Gear by another new to me author, Carmen Reid. This one features a roadtrip through France which I am very much enjoying, and my review will be up later this week.

I finished doing my annual listen to Hogfather by Terry Pratchett! Even though I have listened to it multiple times there are still things that I remember and other things that I do not!  

I have now gone back to listening to The Missing Sister by Lucinda Riley. 

It was our final meeting for our read-on-a-theme book club on Saturday so we had a lunch instead of our customary meeting. Everything was delicious, and not just the food. The theme for this selection was food/cooking. Here are just some of the choices that we shared.

I thought I was being a bit clever as suggesting 25 as our next theme. I was thinking people could read a book from when they were 25, or that was published 25 years ago, or the 25th book in a series, but it might actually be a bit tricky. I have chosen a book now, but it did take some searching to find the book that I wanted to read.

Finally, I am intending to join in with the  "A Very Dickens Christmas" challenge hosted at Snapdragon Alcove. 


I'm watching


If I didn't get as much reading done as I would like, I did get a lot more watched than I have been in previous weeks.

The latest season of Great British Bake Off started here last week. I also watched a couple of the festive specials.

We binged watch two shows. The first was Muster Dogs: Where Are They Now. A couple of years ago now we watched the first season of Muster Dogs, which is when they took a group of Kelpie puppies and sent them off to be trained. At the end of the year they came back together and did a series of tests to work out which the best dog/trainer combination was. Last year, in the second season, they did the same experiment with a litter of Border Puppies. This season was to go back to see how some of the dogs and their owners/families are doing. It's such a delightful show.

The second show we binged was A Man on the Inside which stars Ted Danson as a man who goes undercover in a retirement village to solve a crime! It was so good! We loved it!

We also finished watching Shogun, which I thought was really good but it did take us a while to get through as it is not a show that I could watch more than one or two episodes at a time.

I watched several Christmas movies this week. I loved one, like another a lot, and had a don't waste your time reaction to the third. 

The one that I loved was That Christmas, which is an animated movie written by Richard Curtis, who is famous for a lot of big movies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually. It was so sweet.

I liked The Text Before Christmas, which follows a woman who receives a wrong number call very close to Christmas from an older woman, and they build a relationship which leads them to spending several Christmases together. And she has a dishy son and so on.

Finally, we like British comedian Jack Whitehall and we are even going to seem him live in a few months. However, his Christmas special, Jack in Time for Christmas, is ....not good. It does have a funny part with Michael Buble right at the beginning but it all goes downhill after that.

I did go to the movies this week. I was going a little bit stir crazy from being at home, or maybe from so many Christmas movies. I chose to go and see an Iranian movie called My Favourite Cake. I will confess that I thought it was going to be more foodie than it was, but it was interesting, and the story about the movie was very interesting. It is about an older woman who has been a widow for many years, who decides that she needs to meet a man, but it all goes a bit wrong!

Here's the trailer for That Christmas

Posts from the last week

It's been a very busy blogging week this week, mainly because I am participating in Countdown to 2025 which means a post for that everyday, plus whatever else I am posting. 

Top Ten Tuesday: Short Stories
Countdown to 2025: Days 1, 2 and 3
Countdown to 2025: Day 4

Blog Tour: A Christmas Surprise in Pelican Crossing by Maggie Christensen
Blog Tour: The Silver-haired Sisterhood by Judy Leigh

Countdown to 2025: Day 5

Blog Tour: Starting Over at Starlight Cottage by Debbie Viggiano

Countdown to 2025: Day 6

Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2025 Sign up post

Weekend Cooking: What I Baked In My Kitchen in November

Countdown to 2025: Day 7

Six Degrees of Separation: Sandwich to Agnes and the Hitman

Countdown to 2025: Day 8





I've linked this post to Sunday Salon, hosted at Readerbuzz and  It's Monday, what are you reading? as hosted by Book Date