If this book were less well written I would have tossed it after one chapter - or before. And ordinary young woman in the months before her wedding is unsure and uninterested in just about everything except the young man she met at the railway tea station. Her fiance is also not eager to marry the girl he proposed to in a spasm of guilt.
If you have anything that interests or involves you in your life, this book will make you grateful for it, as all the lives in it are tone-on-tone gray. ( )

A depressing, claustrophobic but painfully accurate modern day fairytale set in a small northern town. Jeannie's life has settled into a dull but safe routine - her job selling perfume in a department store, and Jimmy, the boy she has known all her life who is soon to become her husband. She has a nagging feeling that she should want more, do more, be more, however, so when she meets Danny at the train station, Jeannie flirts with him and starts to doubt her future with Jimmy.

I think everyone has wondered 'Is this it?' at one point in their lives, and Laura Barton's grim depiction of life in a close community, where people leave school, get married, and have children, just because that's what you do, certainly inspired that selfish doubt in me. For most of the story, I was willing Jeannie to dump Jimmy and run off with the charming Danny, but Barton looks at the issue from both sides - is the grass really greener? - and keeps the readers guessing right until the last page. The characters are also really well drawn and realistic, and the dialogue is both weary and witty at the same time. One of my favourite lines is from Jeannie, after Danny tells her that his widowed grandfather is like a swan. 'You mean your grandad can break a man's arm?' she asks, deadpan. My type of humour.

Laura Barton's novel isn't happy or hopeful, but refreshingly honest and worryingly recognisable, especially for those who hale from a forgotten city in the north of England, like myself. ( )

Laura writes like a dream. But we always know that. ( )

I read this as it's by a journalist on the newspaper that I read and based on a town near where I live. It passes a rainy afternoon but that's about the best that can be said for it. A bit of a girly book really. A young girl wonders whether to get married to her long time boyfriend as the wedding approaches. And in the end she does. End of story. ( )