Blog tour: Where Petals Fall by Melissa Foster (review + giveaway)

My edition: Ebook, published on 15 November 2013 by World Literary Press.

Description: On the surface Junie Olson's life looks idyllic, from her handsome husband and beautiful daughter to her successful business, the bakery she always dreamed of opening. But in the past few months her world has slowly unraveled. Her precocious child is withdrawing, showing unexplainable signs of emotional regression, a condition that frays the bonds of Junie's once impenetrable marriage.

When her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, Junie packs up her daughter and goes home to help her mother. Her homecoming stirs up memories of the nightmare she thought she had put behind her, the disappearance of her childhood friend, Ellen. Haunted by recurring memories of what happened on that fateful day, Junie must gather the courage to revisit her past and untangle the secrets surrounding her missing friend, and the trauma that has caused her little girl to climb back into herself.

As the pieces come together on the event that shook her small town, and at the risk of losing everyone she loves, Junie will question everything she thought she could rely on and everyone she thought she knew.

Rating:



Despite having a seemingly perfect marriage, and life in general, things are hard for Junie at the start of the novel. Her daughter Sarah is emotionally regressing and the doctors can't figure out what has triggered this, her husband buries himself in his work as he finds the family situation too difficult to deal with and on top of it all her father passes away and she discovers he may not have been the man she thought he was. With her husband offering little to no support when she so desperately needs it Junie returns home - under the pretence she's there to help out after her father's passing, when really she's the one who craves the comfort of her mother.

When Junie suddenly starts to see flashes of her childhood friend Ellen, who disappeared when she was just a little girl, at first she thinks the stress from dealing with her regressing daughter, emotionally unavailable husband and the grief of losing her father are getting to her. But as the flashes turn into memories she realises there may be more to them. As the questions surrounding her missing friend pile up in her mind she slowly creeps closer to solving the decades old mystery of the disappearance.

It took me a few chapters to get gripped by Where Petals Fall because so many horrible things happen in Junie's life all at once that I initially struggled to connect to and care for her - it was hard to separate the character from all the events surrounding her and understand her as a person. However, once I got to know her a little better I was soon pulled into the story and the mystery element to it and I remained hooked until the very (satisfying) end.

This intricately woven tale was immensely suspenseful and once the story started to unravel I found it impossible to think of anything but Ellen's disappearance and Sarah's seemingly inexplicable regression, trying to find an explanation before Junie did and getting thrown off a few times, just like the character, by the red herrings cleverly written into the book by the author.

As Junie regains the memories from her childhood and the pieces of the puzzle start to slot together, they paint a heart-breaking story of friendship, love, loss and the incredible lengths people go through to protect those they care about.

Engaging and emotional, this is the kind of novel that can only be described as unputdownable.

Purchase your very own copy now from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

GIVEAWAY

Win one of three e-copies of the novel by entering via the Rafflecopter below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Would you like to know more about the author? You can connect with her online at:

Website: www.melissafoster.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/MelissaFosterBooks

Twitter: @melissa_foster


Many thanks to Fiction Addiction Book Tours for organising the tour of Where Petals Fall!