December 2018, and free-spirited Influencers Bo Loxley and her partner Zac are living a life of wanderlust, travelling the globe and sharing their adventures with their millions of fans. Booked to spend Christmas in the Norwegian fjords, they set up home in a remote farm owned by enigmatic mountain guide Anders and his fierce grandmother Signy. Surrounded by snowy peaks and frozen falls, everything should be perfect. But the camera can lie and with every new post, the 'perfect' life Zac and Bo are portraying is diverging from the truth. Something Bo can't explain is wrong at the very heart of their lives and Anders is the only person who'll listen.
June 1936, and fourteen-year old Signy is sent with her sister and village friends to the summer pastures to work as milkmaids, protecting the herd that will sustain the farm through the long, winter months. But miles from home and away from the safety of their families, threat begins to lurk in friendly faces . . .
The mountains keep secrets - Signy knows this better than anyone - and as Bo's life begins to spiral she is forced, like the old woman before her, to question who is friend and who is foe.
*** [The horse stumbled over the rough ground, the air still thick with smoke as they breathlessly picked their way over muddled rocks, their eyes continually drawn up to the desperate scene of devastation laid out before them] ***(Pan, 1 November 2018, ebook, 480 pages, copy from publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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This is my first time reading the author.
I didn't get on so well with The Christmas Lights. I liked the cover and the blurb appealed to me so I thought I'd give it a try. The biggest issue is the main characters, Bo and Zac. They were arrogant, spoiled and completely unlikable. I appreciate you get diverse characters in fiction and I'm not going to like everybody. However, if an author wants me to invest in characters and root for them, they need to give them at least one redeeming quality. The book is festive and I really enjoyed the atmosphere. The book has some good moments and is much darker, especially towards the end, than the pretty cover lets on. However, I struggled to get into the story because I disliked the characters so much.
