📖 Blog Tour ~ A Cottage Full of Secrets by Jane Lovering

 

Boldwood 
15 February 2022

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of the book
and to Rachel's Random Resources for the invitation tot he blog tour

Cottage Two, Bracken Ridge Farm sits at the end of a pitted track, with the glorious Yorkshire moors stretching behind it.

Just a simple two up, two down, the cottage holds the promise of a new start for two very different women, but it is also full of secrets.

Fifty years ago, newly-wed Stella is relishing making the little cottage a happy home. But for all the lovingly handmade curtains, and the hot dinners ready on the table for her husband, Stella’s dreams of married life jar painfully with the truth.

Fifty years later, the cottage is a new beginning for Tamzin. Determined to get away from her previous life, she makes the move to the wild and vast Yorkshire countryside.

When Tamzin finds a sepia photo of a woman, Stella, standing in the cottage’s garden, there’s a sadness in her eyes that Tamzin recognises. As the cottage reveals more of its secrets, Tamzin is desperate to find out whether Stella got her happy ending. And as she gradually makes new friends, and starts to win over her mysterious neighbour Euan, Tamzin dares to dream about her own happy ending too.

📖 My Review...

In A Cottage Full of Secrets we follow in Tamzin's footsteps as she settles into a new life at Cottage Two, Bracken Ridge Farm in the glorious Yorkshire countryside. That she is nursing some secret hurt is obvious but the full extent of her sadness is only revealed as the story progresses. Together with her rescued fox cub, Brack, Tamzin starts to appreciate her surroundings, especially when she gets to know more about her reclusive next door neighbour. Running alongside Tamzin's story is that of Stella who lived at Cottage Two in the nineteen-seventies and whose sad story adds another poignant dimension to this emotional story of love and hurt.

This glorious part of the Yorkshire Dales comes alive with brief glimpses of the wildlife who make the place their home but running alongside descriptions of the glorious landscape is a sensitive and compassionate story about people who have been so hurt by life that they are having to start all over again.  The characters who flit into and out of the story are a delight, especially handy-woman, Jill, whose DIY skill is much admired, but it is rescued fox cub Brack who really stole my heart, along with the enigmatic, Euan McGillan whose artistic skill is absolutely magical. I only wish I could have seen his drawings of Brack for myself.

Beautifully written and lovingly described I started to read A Cottage Full of Secrets on a rainy afternoon and it's such perfect escapism that didn't look up except to make cups of tea until I had finished the story in one sitting.

Best Read with...copious cups of tea and the occasional biscuit

About the Author

Jane Lovering is the bestselling and award-winning romantic comedy writer who won the RNA Novel of the Year Award in 2012 with Please Don’t Stop the Music. She lives in Yorkshire and has a cat and a bonkers terrier, as well as five children who have now left home. Her first title for Boldwood was published in September 2020.

Twitter @janelovering #ACottageFullOfSecrets

Website

@BoldwoodBooks #Boldwoodbloggers #bookandtonic

@rararesources

📖 Blog Tour ~ Home on Folly Farm by Jane Lovering

  

 📖 Delighted to host today's blog tour stop  📖

Boldwood Books
16 March 2016

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of this book
and to Rachel's Random Resources for the invitation to the blog tour

Escape the rat race by heading to the Yorkshire Moors in Jane Lovering’s funny, warm and magical new novel.

Needing an escape, Dora swapped city living for life as a shepherdess on her grandad’s Yorkshire farm. More than a decade later Dora is still there, now farming the fifty acres and caring for the one hundred rare sheep by herself. She never hears the call of the city, but instead relishes the peace and simplicity of life on the Moors.

When Dora’s glamorous but quarrelsome sister Cass, her teenage nephew Thor and his handsome tutor Nat, turn up for an unexpected and unreasonably long stay, life on the farm is thrown into chaos. Cass brings with her unwelcome memories from the past, and of someone who once stole Dora's heart.

Dora takes refuge in the comforting routine of the farm, the sheep never allowing her too much time to dwell. But, as the seasons change, the snow starts to melt, and as lambs begin to fill the fields, Dora can’t keep hiding in the hills. Because even though she’s trying, Dora can’t run away from a love that never really let her go...

 📖 My thoughts,,

When unexpected guests arrive at Folly Farm right in the middle of lambing season, farmer, Dora isn't very impressed, especially as these guests aren't entirely welcome. Dora and her sister Cass are totally different in character, neither one complimenting the other, and the addition of Cass's pre-teenage son, Thor, and his handsome tutor, Nat, doesn't exactly make life any easier for Dora.

What then follows is an interesting, and funny, family story about how this unusual quartet learn to tolerate each other, and even though Dora is still not sure about sharing her home space with them, she does start to mellow, and I think that's what makes this such a lovely story to read. I thought it would be all about angst and arguments but the author cleverly allows each of the characters to have their own space so that we come to appreciate them as individuals.

Home on Folly Farm has a lovely pastoral setting in Yorkshire and I came to love those sections which had Dora tending to her flock of rare breed sheep and all the trials and tribulations of running a farm when finances are threatened, and the horror of sheep rustlers who are targeting lonely, rural farms. Equally, I enjoyed getting to know more about Cass and Thor, who start off as proper townies only to succumb to the magic of Folly Farm. My favourite, and perhaps the most enigmatic character, is Nat whose past is about to catch up with him in the most unexpected of circumstances.

Home on Folly Farm is a beautifully written, and totally engaging read, and although it covers some quite dark issues, it has, at its core, a lovely heartwarming story about the quirkiness of family, the love of the countryside, and the possibility of a second chance at love.

About the Author

Jane Lovering is the bestselling and award-winning romantic comedy writer who won the RNA Novel of the Year Award in 2012 with Please Don’t Stop the Music. She lives in Yorkshire and has a cat and a bonkers terrier, as well as five children who have now left home.

​

Twitter @JaneLovering #HomeOnFollyFarm

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@BoldwoodBooks

@rararesources

Today my guest author is ....Jane Lovering

I am delighted to welcome Jane to the blog

Jane was born in Devon and now lives in Yorkshire. She has five children, four cats and two dogs! She works in a local school and also teaches creative writing. Jane is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and has a first class honours degree in creative writing.

Jane writes romantic comedies which are often described as ‘quirky’.

 Her debut Please Don’t Stop the Music won the 2012 Romantic Novel of the Year and the Best Romantic Comedy Novel award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association.

Choc Lit
7 May 2015

“Maybe he wasn't here because of the lights-maybe they were here because of him"

It’s been over eighteen months since Molly Gilchrist has had a man (as her best friend, Caro, is so fond of reminding her) so when she as good as stumbles upon one on the moors one bitterly cold morning, it seems like the Universe is having a laugh at her expense.

But Phinn Baxter (that’s Doctor Phinneas Baxter) is no common drunkard, as Molly is soon to discover; with a PhD in astrophysics and a tortured past that is a match for Molly’s own disastrous love life.

Finding mysterious men on the moors isn’t the weirdest thing Molly has to contend with, however. There’s also those strange lights she keeps seeing in the sky. The ones she’s only started seeing since meeting Phinn …

Jane ~ Jaffa and I are delighted to welcome you to our blog....

(...Jaffa, this one’s for you…)

Writers and animals go together like…writers and cake. Or writers and chocolate. In fact, writers go well together with almost anything except housework. Writers ‘do’ pets. It’s nice to have the company, for one thing; an uncritical presence in the room that will happily lie on your feet for three hours and not keep saying “are we going out now? Isn’t it time that you went to the shops? What’s for tea?” There’s something about the soft snores of a sleeping dog that let you sit behind the keyboard with a feeling that all is well with the world, and although cats are great disregarders of personal space and will attempt to lie on your keyboard, lap, mug of tea and anything else you particularly want to have access to, when they sit purring in a patch of sunlight, inspiration comes more easily. Of course, I would say all that, I’ve got three dogs, five cats and some chickens, and I have to justify their presence somehow.

And, having all this wildlife about the place, means that animals somehow manage to work their way in to most of my books. How I Wonder What You Are has a particularly curmudgeonly example of a mammalian life form in Stan the horse. Putting animals in books isn’t like writing human characters. The animals don’t have backstories, or angst or arcs that they have to fulfil, they just are, in a wonderfully simple way; they act as confidantes, as absorbers of worry and, in Stan’s case, as mobile waste-disposal units.

All good books should have an animal or two in them, just as most writers’ lives have. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had her spaniel Flush, Charles Dickens had a raven called Grip, I bet Sylvia Plath had an otter or something. My dogs are my excuse to get off my backside and walk every now and again, my cats…well, it’s hard to know exactly how they contribute, but they assure me they do, and the chickens are good at eating up the meals that I put in the oven and then forget about whilst writing, until they are fist-sized lumps of carbon.

Virginia Woolfe had a walrus called Simon, you know …

Buying Links:

Amazon UK: http://goo.gl/SU59KS

Amazon US: http://goo.gl/YBh4vl

www.twitter.com/janelovering

www.janelovering.co.uk

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jane-Lovering-Author/106404969412833

My thanks to Jane for her lovely guest post and to Lusana at Choc Lit for organising everything.

~***~