Jo Carnegie Book Review

Firstly, apologies for a) not posting in a loooong time, uni has kept me rather busy lately, and b) for not posting the BB cream review - every time I go into Boots it's out of stock!

So to keep you going, I'm going to chat about some books I recently bought...

Browsing in Tesco the other day I saw they had a twin pack of books by Jo Carnegie - 'Country Pursuits' and 'Horse Play'. The blurbs hailed the books as 'The new SATC - Sex and the Country, and Carnegie as "The next Jilly Cooper".
Now, I like Sex and the City, and I've never read Jilly Cooper, but the little giggle my Mum gives every time a Jilly Cooper novel comes up in conversation made me want to try these books by Carnegie.

So I soon worked out that both books were part of a series about the little village of Churchminster.
Annoyingly, Country Pursuits is the first in the series, whilst Horse Play is the last...so I guess a trip to WH Smith is in order!

Both books contain a lot of the same characters, the majority of whom are loaded rah-types that try to buy whatever they want.
That said, whilst it would be easy to hate a lot of the characters, Carnegie has a neat trick of showing their more human sides, and the stories tend to focus on problems that can't always be solved with money - adultery, custody battles, estranged parents, ill spouses.
In both books there is a central theme that pulls the members of the village together: in Country Pursuits, it's the threat of a new housing estate taking over some nearby land; in Horse Play it's the development of a locally owned racehorse.

Personally I thought that some of the characters and scenarios were a little hard to believe for a book that was set in the real world. However...that's exactly what I want from a fiction book!!
For me, reading books is a way to unwind from the day and forget about my own life, and these books allowed me to get caught up in the glamorous lives of the people in this supposedly quaint little village.

I found it hard to put the books down, and yet there were some points where I almost didn't want to keep on read on because Carnegie had taken a problem so far that how could it possibly get any better?!

Overall, I would recommend these books as great for a bit of light escapism.
Personally I will definitely be buying the books in between these two!

Happy Reading! X