Feature | Goodbye April ~ Hello May

Goodness, these weeks are flying by! I can't believe I'm on my second Goodbye ~

Hello post already.

To recap, this is wrap up post of the month just gone and a look at what I have coming up in the next month.

April has been a busy month personally, but book and blog wise I posted six reviews along with various My Book Corner features and a whole bunch of cover reveals and guest posts for blog tours.

Here are the books I've reviewed, please click on the images to read.

March saw Lozza's Book Corner take part in six blog tours covering a mixture of reviews, guest posts and Q&A's. I would also again like to thank Tracey Sinclair, Helena Sheffield, Laurie Ellingham, Victoria Walters and Isabelle Broom for taking part in the My Book Corner feature.

This feature has really taken off in the last month, as I put a pinned tweet up and I'm now scheduled up until the beginning of August with a host of bloggers and authors taking part!

It's been a good month for receiving books too. 

Thanks to some amazing publishers my TBR is never ending and the new titles added are:

eBooks

The Summer We Danced -Fiona Harper

An Autumn Affair & A Summer of Secrets - Both by Alice Ross

The Summer Flings Travel Club - Aimee Duffy

Something Old, Something New - Darcie Boleyn

Summer at the Cornish Cafe - Phillipa Ashley

The Secret of Orchard Cottage - Alex Brown

Cupcakes and Confetti - Jane Linfoot

Paperbacks

The Assistants - Camille Perri

Martini Henry - Sara Crow

Mad Girl -Bryony Gordon

And finally, March saw the blog have a little makeover. 

I'm one of these that are never happy until it's just right and can now say that I love the new header, ratings image and signature to sign my post's off with. I now just need to decide whether to keep the floral background or revert to one that's not so busy - please let me know your thoughts as you are the ones that read the blog after all!

Moving on to the month ahead then..

As a general rule, I love May. I love seeing the blossom on the blossom on the trees and the feeling that the weather is starting to get warmer, but it's also a bitter sweet month for me too.

It's my birthday month and my late Nan's birthday is the day after mine. We always used to have lunch together and then enjoy tea and cake - she was the only other person I knew that put the milk in first and had her tea milky so it was out treat to have together without the rest of the family passing comment!

I'm not sure what I am doing for my actual birthday yet (other than working...boo!) but I am hoping to go away the weekend after to spend some time with my nieces and nephew.

I've kept the diary fairly empty for this month. I'm on a few blog tours and have a couple of cover reveals planned but I'm concentrating on attacking the TBR throughout May.

As well as the books mentioned in the above TBR list, the following three are right at the top!

The One We Fell In Love With - Paige Toon

Always With Love - Giovanna Fletcher

Lovers and Liars - Nigel May

Wishing you all a fabulous month of reading!

Review | When I Was Invisible ~ Dorothy Koomson

Published: May 2016

Buy: Amazon

In 1988, two girls with identical names and the same love of ballet meet for the first time. They seem destined to be best friends forever and to become professional dancers.

Years later, however, they have both been dealt so many cruel and unexpected blows that they walk away from each other into very different futures - one enters a convent, the other becomes a minor celebrity.

Will these new, "invisible" lives be the ones they were meant to live, or will they only find that kind of salvations when they are reunited twenty years later?

Veronica Harper and Veronika Harper, Roni and Nika respectively, met at school and then joined the same ballet class, we are thrown right into this innocent world of big dreams, love and friendship at the start of the novel.

Very quickly it becomes clear that something happened between the girls in their teens that pushed them apart, right up until the end of the book although I had my suspicions, we were never really told and even then there was more going on that we were lead to believe.

The book alternates between both Roni and Nika, although I felt Nika had a much bigger storyline, and within their narratives we were thrown between the present day, their childhood/teens and what happened in the many years that passed.

This is my first novel by Dorothy Koomson, and although there was one bit in the middle where I felt like I was re-reading the complete first half of the book, as a whole - it had me gripped, Dorothy has a wonderful way of story telling despite some of the plot lines being very raw and dark.

When I Was Invisible was powerful and captivating, telling a story of two girls with history - I was eager to find out how Roni became a Nun and Sister and how Nika ended up being a celebrity who disappeared with no trace - and how they deal with consequences of their past to move forward with their future.

Rating: 5/5

I would like to thank

 LoveReading & Cornerstone 

for providing a copy of

When I Was Invisible

 in exchange for my honest opinion.