Capable, confident and career-driven, Ellen had her dream job and a marriage proposal from boyfriend Ross. Life was good, her future set. Until it wasn’t and everything fell apart…
Whisked off to the beautiful island of Corfu to plan her sister Lacey’s big, fat, Greek wedding, Ellen is hoping some time out will help clear her head and heal her heart. But letting go of her past is not going to be easy.
With Lacey in full on Bridezilla mode, Ellen is soon distracted from her own problems. And when the all-inclusive treats on offer at hotel Blue Vue include one gorgeous, brooding Adonis – Yan – Ellen finds him difficult to resist.
But Ellen isn’t looking for love or lust, or anything involving too much ouzo…or is she?"
Rating: 3/5
You can buy Truly, Madly, Greekly as an eBook now.
I love when I heard things on Twitter and other blog's about how great a book is - it makes me really excited to read it and find out what all the fuss is about! This was definitely the case with Mandy Baggot's first book with publishers Bookouture - Truly, Madly, Greekly. I was thrilled to get a copy from Netgalley, and started to read it straight away. After about a third of the novel, however, I wondered what I was missing because it wasn't quite what I had expected, and I wasn't enjoying it as much as I had hoped, and annoyingly this carried on throughout the book. It was a good read, but just didn't have that something to make it a brilliant read sadly.
The book follows 2 sisters, Ellen and Lacey, as they travel to Greece for a holiday to scout a wedding venue for Lacey's impending nuptials. They end up on Corfu, staying in a beautiful hotel, and they really couldn't ask for more. However, Ellen is hiding a secret from Lacey and their family, and she's using this holiday as a good excuse to get away from the horrible reality of what she has done. She starts to grow close to one of the staff at the hotel, Yan, who has secrets of his own. But Ellen is sure she isn't looking for any kind of romance.... but maybe it's looking for her...
As I said above, although this was a good story, I struggled to find it better than that, and just didn't seem to connect with it in quite a few ways. Firstly, I had problems with the main characters. While Ellen and Yan are nice people, they were a bit, well, boring. Ellen didn't have anything about her that made me like her, or want to read about her story. Her sister was pretty awful, very selfish and I was willing Ellen to grow a bit of a backbone and tell her what she really thought. But Ellen just didn't seem strong enough as a character to hold the whole book together, and this was a real problem for me. I just didn't care about her friendship with Yan, it all felt a bit cliched and rushed to me, and they didn't strike me a good fit together.
Yan was lovely - a nice person, a hard worker and sounded gorgeous, but that was it. Again, he was a little dull and didn't stand out to me at all. He was very moral, determined not to let anything happen with Ellen because she is a guest, and he could lose his job which is all well and good, but it is a bit boring! I was desperate for him to throw caution to the wind and do something a bit naughty, just to give the book a bit of action! Perhaps this was my other issue with the book - that nothing really happened in it. I was sat reading, waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever really did - it just sort of plodded along, and I found the pace of it quite slow.
The setting of Corfu in Greece was a good one - Mandy Baggot describes it well and brings it to life nicely on the page. I enjoyed reading about the gorgeous beaches, the sunshine and the lovely hotel, it was a nice bit of escapism, but it wasn't quite enough to make me desperate to pick the book up each night and find out what was going to happen next. This just wasn't the light-hearted, fun summer story I felt I had been promised, and perhaps that is why I was let-down by the book. I went into it expecting something that just didn't deliver for me. It was a pleasant enough read, with sun, good characters and a bit of a romance, but it just didn't go that extra mile for me unfortunately.
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