Review: The Lost and Found Life of Rosy Bennett by Jan Birley

Title: The Lost and Found Life of Rosy Bennett
Author: Jan Birley
Format: Ebook
Publisher: Acorn Independent Press
Publish Date: November 4, 2015
Source: Author

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "Rosy loved her London life – her job in a designer shop, her gorgeous West London family house and of course her gorgeous family (although young sons are enough to test anyone at times). All that disappears when, one unremarkable morning, after one unremarkable school run, her husband collapses on a crowded tube carriage and dies. 
As she struggles her way through the grief, she discovers her husband’s secret life: secrets accounts, secret deals that their solicitor knew nothing of, secret debts and what looks like a secret “very close friend” at least. 

Totally unprepared and suddenly in debt, Rosy is forced to leave London to start a new life with her incredibly reluctant boys in the countryside. Can angsty urban teenagers cope with farm life, let alone enjoy it? More to the point, can their mother? It’s certainly not going to be easy but when you are at rock bottom the only way is up."

My Two Cents:

"The Lost and Found Life of Rosy Bennett" is the story of Rosy, a wife and mother of two boys, who suddenly loses her husband. Her life is thrown into a tailspin when she finds out that her husband was not exactly truthful with her and spent most of the money buying a random alpaca farm in the middle of the countryside. This is only the first of many surprises that her husband left behind. Although she is shocked, she thinks that moving to the farm could be the fresh start she and her boys need. What follows is a good story with a lot of twists and turns that kept me flipping the pages!

This is partly a fish-out-of-water story as Rosy and her sons have to cope with moving from London to the countryside. Her son, James, has a lot of trouble with this. It was interesting to see how Rosy was almost tip-toeing around James, even when his behavior got ridiculous. I didn't quite understand the motivation behind her not dealing with him as his behavior begins to affect more and more of the other characters throughout the book but I think it illustrates just how helpless Rosy feels.  She doesn't know what to do when the hits keep coming. I thought the author did a good job of showing the sheer chaos that the main characters are going through.

As I mentioned, I liked a lot of the twists and turns in the book. Of course, because they are twists and turns, I really can't go into much detail about what happens. The author also did a pretty good job of pacing the twists and turns to keep the narrative fairly even flowing. 

I also have to mention that I loved that the book took place on an alpaca farm. One of my dreams would be to get to hang around alpacas all day. They are such cool creatures! When Rosy first finds out that she owns an alpaca farm, she barely even knows what an alpaca is! She finds out very quickly as to why they appeal to so many people!

Overall, this is a good story about starting over!