The Beginning of Everything by Jackie Fraser

  Engaging, Emotional, Tedious

Genre: Contemporary Fiction/Romance
The Beginning of Everything by Jackie Fraser ☔💧
Waking up at 45 years of age in a tent, in the most inconspicuous part of a graveyard that she could find, wasn’t exactly where Jess had imagined that she would find herself at this point in her life. From her mid teenage years, she had been running away from something or someone, the latest being the latter. She’d been in her current situation for about two weeks, and that had been long enough to stake out her current surroundings and to locate somewhere that might be a bit more secure. The trouble was, it wasn’t hers, nowhere was hers, and she knew that one day soon she would have to vacate her new ‘home’ as the new occupants wouldn’t want her there. But then maybe everyone is quite as predictable as she thinks. 🏕🏠
I’d just read ‘The Bookshop of Second Chances’, another novel by Jackie Fraser and loved it, although it had been a slow burner. It seemed at the beginning of this second novel by JF that this too was going to take a while to pique my interest, and I surmised that maybe that was just her writing style. However, although I enjoyed the actual narrative, I found this book to be rather wordy and felt that certain scenes were needlessly prolonged. Jess is an over-thinker in the strongest terms, whilst Gethin is a people pleaser, two types of person that can get tiresome if over egged. The whole process of her locating her next place to stay, waiting for the inevitability of being discovered and then waiting for the owner of the house the next day following the note, deciding whether she wants to stay or move on, the constant indecision about how she feels about her new life, and the part at the end where they discuss their feelings, all felt a bit of a faff and served to make parts of the storyline quite hard work. I acknowledge that she had ghosts from her past, but she acknowledges in her head that she knows she is safe, yet still remains extremely guarded and when she makes the decision to move in with Bea, running away again, not even being certain that she has any foundation for doing so, it is just mind numbingly frustrating, and at that point, I didn’t know whether to cry or feel angry. The lack of very necessary communication between Jess and Gethin was a difficult element of the storyline for me. On a positive note, parts did evoke powerful emotions. The Author goes into such detail that you feel like you are living every day with the lead female character and for me, it was just too much. There were though, parts that kept me reading. The sequence of events between where she leaves Sunnyside, until the part in her rented room where Gethin pays her a late night visit after talking to her in the restauraunt, I so desperately wanted them to be together that I couldn’t put it down. I definitely had a love and ‘no so much love’ relationship with this read. Despite my reservations about ‘The Beginning Of Everything’, I will be returning to Jackie Fraser’s books at some point.
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