Today I’m very excited to be a part of the blog tour for The Wildflowers by Harriet Evans! I have a review coming up, so read on to see what I thought of it…

Title: The Wildflowers 
Author: Harriet Evans
Publisher: Headline

[Synopsis]

Tony and Althea Wilde. Glamorous, argumentative … adulterous to the core.

They were my parents, actors known by everyone. They gave our lives love and colour in a house by the sea – the house that sheltered my orphaned father when he was a boy.

But the summer Mads arrived changed everything. She too had been abandoned and my father understood why. We Wildflowers took her in.

My father was my hero, he gave us a golden childhood, but the past was always going to catch up with him … it comes for us all, sooner or later.

This is my story. I am Cordelia Wilde. A singer without a voice. A daughter without a father. Let me take you inside.

[My Review]

The Wildflowers is a sweet, absorbing story about growing up, family secrets and the effect that glimping something you ‘shouldn’t have’ – even for a moment – can have such a profound effect throughout your life…

If that sounds a bit vague, good – I don’t want to give too much away about this story as I think it’s best to approach it without any preconceptions, as I did. It’s certainly a long read (at times I felt perhaps it could have been trimmed down, but only a little) and the fact that you feel like you’re with these characters for so long – some of them from kids right through to adulthood – means you feel far more absorbed in their stories; I always feel a deeper connection with characters when you experience big life events and emotions along with them – when you really see how they grow throughout their lives.

The characters in this story really make this story what it is, I feel; though some are far less likable than others, all had their own quirks and interesting aspects. We switch between characters, experiencing what life at that time was like for not only main narrator Cordelia but her mother Althea, her father Tony, and other people too! We also jump back in time, to the 1940’s of Tony’s youth, and this offers a brilliantly contrasting view of life, and helps link together some of the characters in the reader’s mind.

There’s an element of mystery throughout – just a hint of one at some times, and as a much more pressing theme at others – which made me want to read on and find out what exactly happened all those years ago…

If you enjoy family sagas with a real sense of time and place (I could almost imagine being right there with them, in 1970’s Cornwall and onwards, at various points in this story, and I really enjoyed reading about the 90’s too – an era I only experienced as a child but which evokes some strong memories in me nevertheless) then you’ll enjoy The Wildflowers.

Set some time aside for it and really lose yourself in the characters, the time, the place… as I did!

Many thanks to Anne Cater and Headline for inviting me onto the blog tour and providing a copy of this novel, on which I chose to write an honest and unbiased review!

Follow the blog tour…

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