#BlogTour: Maria In The Moon by Louise Beech @LouiseWriter @OrendaBooks @annecater

I’m absolutely delighted to be on the Maria In The Moon blog tour today! I have been a huge fan of Louise Beech’s books since reading The Mountain In My Shoe so I jumped at the chance to be on the blog tour and help spread the word about her brilliant books.  Maria In the Moon is out now in paperback and e-book.

Book Blurb:

Thirty-two-year-old Catherine Hope has a great memory. But she can’t remember everything. She can’t remember her ninth year. She can’t remember when her insomnia started. And she can’t remember why everyone stopped calling her Catherine-Maria.

With a promiscuous past, and licking her wounds after a painful breakup, Catherine wonders why she resists anything approaching real love. But when she loses her home to the devastating deluge of 2007 and volunteers at Flood Crisis, a devastating memory emerges… and changes everything.

Dark, poignant and deeply moving, Maria in the Moon is an examination of the nature of memory and truth, and the defenses we build to protect ourselves, when we can no longer hide…

My Review:

I always feel slightly apprehensive when reading a book that has had so many fantastic reviews from my fellow bloggers as it can raise your expectations leaving you expecting a lot from a book before you have even started.  Fortunately I have now joined the long line of fans for this book and have been recommending it to everyone who will listen!

Maria is a fantastic main character. I felt a lot of sympathy for her and the situations that she finds herself in.  She’s a very real character in that she’s not perfect and she does make mistakes but this helps increase the readers empathy for her as we have all found ourselves in similar situations!  I loved her sense of humour, particularly her hilarious observations of other people which had me laughing out loud at times.  It was very poignant to read about her broken relationship with her mother, which is very fraught and some of the awful things her mother says about her. It was hard to read about her trying to not let these things upset her and pretend not to care.  The state of this relationship is made worse by the loss of a much-loved father and you really feel for her when she makes comparisons between how things are now compared with the past.

I thought it was quite brave of the author to write about an event that happened so recently and would still be remembered by a lot of people, including of course people who were flooded themselves.  It was interesting to read about the many ways in which people were affected by the flood and how long after the waters had receded the floods continued to have an impact on their lives.  Simple things in everyday life, like being able to access public transport and being able to sleep when its raining were suddenly a challenge to people which I hadn’t fully considered before.

Maria’s work at the call center added an interesting slant to the story, as it allowed the reader to see a different, kinder version of Maria then what she normally showed to the world.  She really seemed to care about the callers and want to help them.  It was quite poignant at times to read about her shifts at the call center as I felt that she was in need of a bit of love and care too at times which she wasn’t always receiving.  Some of the things that people phoned up about were hilarious as they were quite random and sometimes not even flood related.  This caused some of the more comic and memorable moments in the book for me that I have remembered long after finishing reading.

This book is so beautifully written.  It really draws you in from the first page and gets inside your mind so that you are constantly thinking about it even when you aren’t reading it.  There is always something happening, some mini drama in Maria’s life that keeps you reading to find out how it works out and because, you care about Maria and want her to have a happy ending. You experience every emotion alongside Maria as she tries to work out where she is going in life and what she wants.  I laughed, I cried, I was frustrated but most importantly I loved reading about Maria’s life and I was very sad when the book ended.

Huge thanks to Orenda books and Anne Cater for my copy of the book and for inviting me on the blog tour.  This will definitely be a book I will think about, and recommend to people, for ages!

About The Author:

 

 

 

 

Louise Beech has been writing since she could physically hold a pen. She
regularly writes travel pieces for the Hull Daily Mail, where she was a columnist for
ten years. Her short fiction has won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award
for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting
twice for the Bridport Prize. Louise lives with her husband and children on the
outskirts of Hull – the UK’s 2017 City of Culture – and loves her job as Front of
House Usher at Hull Truck Theatre, where her first play was performed in 2012.
Her debut novel, How to be Brave, was a number one bestseller on Kindle in the
UK and Australia, and a Guardian Readers’ Pick in 2015. The Mountain in my Shoe
longlisted for the Guardian Not The Booker Prize.

Follow The Blog Tour:

If you liked the sound of Maria In The Moon from my review, do follow the blog tour and find out my fellow bloggers reviews!