📸🥂🍷🚨The Favour by Laura Vaughan… A Book Blog Tour Review!!! 📸 🥂 🍷 🚨

❤️ this cover!!!

Publication Date: Out now!!!

Format: Hardback & Ebook

Price: £14.99

Publisher: Corvus

I would like to say a huge thank you to Anne Cater and Random Things Tours for organising this, intriguing, fascinating and compelling book’s tour. I would like to say thank you to Corvus publishing and Netgalley for allowing me access to a digital copy for reviewing, I am always extremely grateful for access to such brilliant books. I would also like to say a huge thank you to the creative talents, the author Laura Vaughan, just wow what a book, I can almost still visualise and smell the Italian sun also thank you for making me yearn and weep for wanting to go on holiday during lockdown (hehe honestly very cruel lol). So what is this gorgeous book about? well lets head over to the blurb and find out.

Fortune favours the fraud…..

When she was thirteen years old, Ada Howell lost not just her father, but the life she felt she was destined to lead. Now, at eighteen, Ada is given a second chance when her wealthy godmother gifts her with an extravagant art history trip to Italy.

In the Palazzos of Venice, the cathedrals of Florence and the villas of Rome, she finally finds herself among the kind of people she aspires to be: sophisticated, cultured, privileged. Ada does everything in her power to prove she is one of them. And when a member of the group dies in suspicious circumstances, she seizes the opportunity to permanently bind herself to this gilded set.

But everything hidden must eventually surface, and when it does, Ada discovers she’s been keeping a far darker secret than she could ever have imagined…….

Wow what a book!!! I know I have said that before but wow… this book really is a beautiful portrayal of obsession, of trying to pretend to yourself and everyone else that you are destined for greater things and to be rich and powerful, and yet when you do get into those glittering circles is it actually what you wanted all along or as the saying goes sometimes the grass is not greener on the other side. We follow Ada from a devastating loss of both father and home, to what she considers beneath her dignity to live in. From the first moment we meet Ada her character just shines through, in its spikey, whiny, spoilt and yes ambitious mind. But what we also have to remember is that though she is all of that she also doesn’t see what she actually wants, which is someone to love and to see her. She loses her father at an age where a father figure is most needed, yes please don’t get me wrong mothers are just as important, and that a man being around doesn’t mean anything, ok what I meant by a father is someone else other than her mother, maybe an uncle, aunt or even another woman (see modern) who can shape her alongside her mother, but of course she is torn from her home, that I am sorry to say she sees the disrepair, the mould and basically doesn’t understand that the upkeep is more than what her mother or anyone without wads of cash can afford. To her this is her home, her castle, her dreams and fantasies of being lady of the manor, they are all ripped away when the one person who she feels can get her places leaves her.

We then see that though she should by now realise that maybe she should set her mind on looking after mum and focusing on normal everyday things, nope she gets excited and even more obsessed with her desire to be in with the wealthy set, the place where she should have been all along, due to her godmother encouraging her in her fantasies. Her mother can only watch on whilst this goes on, maybe with relief, sadness and dismay, as she probably knows this will all end in tears or disaster for her, but cannot control her daughters obsession or maybe doesn’t see where it will lead. We are then sent on a wonderful, rich in colour, culture, food and of course wealth tour of Italy and its art’s history, for me this part of the story was so vivid and so real to life it made me think of my past holiday’s in Florence, Sienna and Lucca (during lockdown this is an exquisite torture due to me sighing over the food, wine and coffee thats mentioned).

The characters are so lifelike and vibrant they almost spring out of the pages, I can almost taste, smell and touch the air in Venice and hear the sights and sounds of Florence’s cathedral’s bells and of course the sounds of noisy Italians intermingled with the lazy drawl of the wealthy kids wandering around the piazzas of both Venice and Florence. The action is then fixed firmly and centrally in Rome and the whole pace of the novel shifts into 1st gear as we build to the crescendo. I won’t say more than this, as I don’t want to spoil this scintillating, beautiful and sinister novel. I loved that it has elements of a bygone age of Grand European tours ( like what young men and women in 18th and 19th centuries went on both for different reasons, one for mainly dissipate, and making as many connections as possible and the other for marriage material) as well as the sinister The Talented Mr Ripley-esque style narrative which seeps beneath the surface (it makes me want to read this book). I loved how Ada interacts with them all, how she slips into her role like a snake with new skin shrugging off the old desiccated dry skin. For me she, does come across as cold, scheming and kind of pathologically without morals, then we see it all twisted and screwed from a different angle and she becomes if not warmer but also more human and vulnerable too.

I loved this book and I cannot recommend this highly enough, its just brilliant, sharp, witty and beguiling, if you love Patricia Highsmith and her works I can honestly say Laura makes her run for her money and you should buy this book asap!!! you will not regret this purchase at all.

Ratings: 5 🌟s with a ☕️ maybe 🍷 and some 🧁 and 🧀 and 🍇 (for added luxury) you have to be subtle in your choice of food if you want to be part of the elite 😉

Authors Blurb:

Laura Vaughan

Laura Vaughan grew up in rural Wales and studied Art History in Italy and Classics at Bristol and Oxford. She got her first book deal aged twenty-two and went on to write eleven books for children and young adults. The Favour is her first novel for adults (I want more!!!!) She lives in South London with her husband and two children.

I hope you have enjoyed this pleasurable, luxurious, sinuous, insidious, sinister, decadent and gorgeous rollercoaster of a ride of what it could be like to live your dream and fantasy life and how it tastes to just be untroubled by money worries or cares, but like anything you wish for, you had better be prepared for what happens when things start to crumble, because not everything that glitter is gold. If you are intrigued by this book you can buy it at Waterstones, any independents and of course on Amazon. I will leave you now to say Happy Reading and see you all soon!!!

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