Blog Tour ~ A Forsaken Friend by Sue Featherstone and Susan Pope. #IntelligentChickLit

No-one said friendship was easy.

Things can’t get much worse for Teri Meyer. If losing her job at the university and the regular allowance from her dad’s factory isn’t bad enough, now her ex-best friend has gone and stolen her ex-husband! Well, to hell with them all. A few weeks in the countryside at her brother’s smallholding should do the trick – and the gorgeous and god-like neighbour might help.  But then there’s Declan, not to mention Duck’s Arse back in Yorkshire…  It’s not as if Lee Harper set out to fall in love with her best friend’s ex-husband. But, for once, her love life is looking up – except for all the elephants in the room, not to mention Mammy’s opinion on her dating a twice-divorced man. Perhaps things aren’t as rosy as she first thought. And now with one family crisis after another, Lee’s juggling more roles – and emotions – than she ever imagined.  Maybe sharing her life with a man wasn’t such a grand idea.  The FRIENDS trilogy continues in this heart-warming and hilarious hoot as two best friends navigate men, careers, family and rock bottom in this brilliant sequel to A FALLING FRIEND. 

Review

I would like to thank the authors Sue Featherstone and Susan Pope , publisher Lakewater Press and blog tour organiser Anne Cater for the ARC of A Forsaken Friend in return for an honest review.
It’s confession time, I am not a big Chic Lit reader, so when I was offered this as a review copy, I thought about it carefully, worried that I wouldn’t be able to do a fair review, one the book and authors deserved. You write a book and put your heart and soul into it, then you place it in the hands of someone you have never met and trust they will adore the story you have crafted with love, it must be hard and writers are incredibly brave!
When I looked at the book description, it describes itself as Chic Lit with attitude and it has that in spade loads. It’s also funny, very funny in places. It deals with issues such as relationships and how fractured they can become, yet still at their core remain strong and necessary. We face with Lee and Teri issues such as grief, love and the vagaries of modern life.
After reading it I realised it wasn’t just Chic Lit with attitude, it’s intelligent and relevant to our everyday lives and most importantly it’s fun to read. I found myself nodding, laughing and feeling genuine sadness at those points where the story dealt with issues of loss. Chic Lit is a vibrant genre, much loved my millions of readers and there is reason for that, they deal with often complex issues with a lightness of touch that reflects how people interact and live their lives.
I found both Lee and Teri are to be fabulous characters, even when they were behaving badly they were warm and easy to like, we can all identify with them and their actions in some way. As friends they work, because although the friendship is fractured, it is realistic. How many of us fall out with close friends, or go weeks without seeing them, yet we are still friends, even if occasionally that relationship seems one sided or full of drama.
This is a great book to read. Fun and with a depth to the storyline most people don’t associate chic lit with, which is a shame, because there is a reason so many people love it. I glad to say not only did I love it, it has redefined my attitude to chic lit and I look forward to yet more of Lee and Ali’s lives.

A Forsaken Friend can be purchased from Amazon in ebook form and as a paperback.

About the authors.

Sue Featherstone and Susan Pape are both former newspaper journalists with extensive experience of working for national and regional papers and magazines, and in public relations.
More recently they have worked in higher education, teaching journalism – Sue at Sheffield Hallam and Susan at Leeds Trinity University.
The pair, who have been friends for 25 years, wrote two successful journalism text books together – Newspaper Journalism: A Practical Introduction and Feature Writing: A Practical Introduction (both published by Sage).
Their debut novel, A Falling Friend, published by Lakewater Press, has been followed by a second book, A Failing Friend, in their Friends trilogy.
Sue, who is married with two grown-up daughters, loves reading, writing and Nordic walking in the beautiful countryside near her Yorkshire home.
Susan is married and lives in a village near Leeds, and, when not writing, loves walking and cycling in the Yorkshire Dales. She is also a member of a local ukulele orchestra. They blog about books at Bookloversbooklist.

The Sue Featherstone can be followed on Twitter at @Sue_Writer and Susan Pope at @wordfocus.