A Place For Us by Harriet Evans

The house has soft, purple wisteria twining around the door.
You step inside. 
The hall is cool after the hot summer's day. 
The welcome is kind, and always warm.
Yet something makes you suspect life here can't be as perfect as it seems. After all, the brightest smile can hide the darkest secret.
But wouldn't you pay any price to have a glorious place like this? Welcome to Winterfold. 
Martha Winter's family is finally coming home.

I have only read one Harriet Evans book previously and I have wanted to try another of her books. I did try reading A Place for Us earlier in the year when the book became available in parts but I was a bit impatient waiting for the next instalment so I decided to wait until the book came out as a whole so I could enjoy it all in one go.

The storyline jumps back and forward in time and each chapter alternates between each of the members of the Winter family and the lovely Joe. There are many family secrets that Martha and David the head of the family have kept from them all but Martha can no longer keep the secrets any longer and so she plans a family lunch which the Gorgeous chef Joe caters for and she plans to tell the family then but none of the family could predict the big secret Martha has been hiding.

Each chapter alternates between each member of the family and believe me there are a lot of members of this family and you cannot get bored with anyone of these characters because each and every one of them all seem to have their own dilemmas. I really enjoyed reading about Cat who is living in Paris and has kept her own secret from her family, I really longed for her to have a happy ending especially because she seemed the more normal one of the family! I also loved Joe he was misunderstood and I really felt sorry for him as you could see that he was a loving, good natured, family man. Martha, Florence and Daisy all seemed like very disturbed characters and I think a lot of Florence and Martha’s problems were all caused from the effect of the secrets whereas Daisy was an awful character and the author wrote her character very well.

I loved uncovering all the secrets and I enjoyed seeing the characters making decisions to try and turn their lives around to get themselves on the right path. There were some great unpredictable parts to the book too which is always a big bonus for me in a book.

I do feel like the book was a little too drawn out for me especially with the way the book was structured with the continual chopping and changing between each characters I did find there was a lull in the middle of the book where my interested began to waver slightly but luckily the author pulled me back it. I enjoyed this book and I will be picking up more books by this author.

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