Sunday, June 22, 2014

Book Review - The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh - A First Reads Book Sent In Exchange For Reveiw From Good Reads!


I won this book as a First Reads from Good Reads....I read the book over two or three days I liked the authors writing in that she really described the scenes in Majorca in Spain. I had problems in that I really didn't find that I liked the characters of the book. This was kind of unusual for me. If it weren't for the way that the author wrote it I may not have finished it. Jenn (a forty something wife) of Greg a professor at University who have been married for years. Emma their daughter is Jenn's step daughter her Mother died during birth. Greg and Jenn decide to come to their annual vacation place for one week and allow after much discussion even though they haven't really met the kid, Emma is going to bring her boyfriend Nathan with her for the second week of their vacation. Emma is fifteen, a fairly young fifteen while Nathan it seems is a fairly older and more experienced seventeen year old. Jenn finds herself alone with Nathan and realises after a while that Nathan is flirting with her. Which is flattering but kind of unthinkable. She's been married forever and things have kind of gotten rather setteled and predictable with her marriage and her husband seems to be kind of depressed and self involved lately which will by the end of the book show why. He's not paying much attention to Jenn these days. The book evolves with Emma and Nathan fighting, and Nathan and Jenn spendding more and more time together alone and they slowly get into more than flirting, which is very tough for Jenn to think about after each time she spends time with Nathan, each time she thinks she needs to get Nathan on the plane and out of their, or her life is going to come apart at the seams if her daughter or husband find out what is going on. The sexual scenes are not very long and kind of unusually written, almost as if the author is not used to writing such involved sexual scenes. Anyway, I guess I had to finish the book just to find out if Jenn and Nathan do get found out......and that is all I can say about this book without giving away the ending.

Here si the description as found on Good Reads:
Set on the rugged, mountainous west coast of Mallorca, this taut, sultry, brilliantly paced novel is an urgent meditation on female desire, the vicissitudes of marriage and the allure of youth.

Taking place over the course of one week, The Lemon Grove lands in the heat of Deia, a village on an island off the southeast coast of Spain. Jenn and Greg are on their annual holiday to enjoy languorous, close afternoons by the pool, and relaxed dinners overlooking the rocks. But the equilibrium is upset by the arrival of their teenage daughter, Emma, and her boyfriend, Nathan. Jenn, in her early forties, loves her (older) husband and her (step)daughter and is content with her life, she thinks. But when this beautiful, reckless young man comes into her world, she is caught by a sexual compulsion that she's seldom felt before. As the lines hotly blur between attraction, desire and obsession, Jenn’s world is thrown into tumult--by Nathan's side, she could be young and carefree once again, and at this stage in her life, the promise of youth is every bit as seductive as the promise of passion. Jenn struggles between the conflicting pulls of resistance and release, and the events of the next few days have the potential to put lives in jeopardy as the players carry out their roles in this unstoppably sexy and unputdownable novel from a brilliant observer of the human condition.
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