Hello friends and bookworms, I’m here to share with you my review of The Perfect Life by Nuala Ellwood. I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of this book from NetGalley and Penguin General UK in return for an honest review.
The Perfect Life is due to be published on the 5th August 2021 and you can read the synopsis here.
Overall rating – 3 out of 5 stars.
I wanted so badly to absolutely love this book, but sadly I just couldn’t bring myself to do so.
Throughout the book I found myself getting increasingly confused with which time frame we were in, there were at least 3 different time frames that we switched between. Which would have been fine had there been some clear indication of it, but it just felt muddled.
Which is a real shame, because the writing was so well done, and each different time frame was incredibly written, it was descriptive and invoked so many different emotions. There were points that I felt as if I was in the book with the characters watching it unfold as if it was real life, in front of me.
For me, because we flitted so much between the different time periods it felt as if there wasn’t a clear plot or story, if someone was to ask me what The Perfect Life was about I wouldn’t be able to give a clear answer because I don’t think there was a plot so to speak.
And character wise, I struggled to really engage with them, there was just too much going on, we were being fed too much information about each person and it got very difficult to distinguish how the author wanted us to view the characters.
The ending was clever, but it felt as if it was from a different book, it just didn’t link with the rest of the plot…
Without giving too much away, I struggled with a couple of conclusions that were reached and why characters just suddenly reappeared with no explanation, they could have been woven into the story better.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy The Perfect Life, it’s more so that I enjoyed the individual aspects of it, which apart were really well written and descriptive, but together just didn’t gel in the right way to make the story. There was too much going on and not enough to link everything together.
Let me know if you’ve read The Perfect Life and what you thought, I’m interested to hear what others thought of it!
Until next time, Em xxx
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