Published 25th April 2024 by Simon and Schuster.
From the cover of the book:
Her dream holiday is his everyday life. His dream holiday is her normal life. What happens when they collide?Ally and her dad, Geoff, run the family business, a creative retreat, from their home Hollyhock Cottage in picturesque Kittiwake Cove. They give their guests their dream break, but Ally hankers after glamourous city living, fancy restaurants and art galleries.
Ally’s survival strategy is to escape out of season, take a break abroad and pretend to be the person she always imagined she would be. She meets Logan while she’s away and he turns out to be exactly the kind of distraction she’s looking for.
With her spirits restored, Ally returns home, picks up the reins again and sets her sights on another successful season, but when Logan unexpectedly arrives on the scene, she soon realises she’s in for a summer that’s going to be far from straightforward…
A story about bringing a holiday home – and what happens when what goes on on holiday comes back to bite you…
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When Ally's mother died unexpectedly, she suddenly found herself tied to a promise to help her dad achieve her parents' dream of turning Hollyhock Cottage, in Dorset's beautiful Kittiwake Cove, into a creative retreat. True to her word, Ally has done just that, never admitting to her father that in her heart she has never loved the house, or the Cove come to think of it, and yearns to follow her dream of exciting city living in Spain.
Ally tells herself that the escapist holidays she takes out of season, pretending to be the kind of person she once envisaged she would be, are enough to keep her sane amidst the busy, but unfulfilling, life she leads back in Dorset. But her latest trip to Barcelona has thrown an emotional spanner in her carefully curated works. For during her adventure in the guise of sophisticated 'Flora', she meets the extremely attractive Logan. She finds herself developing real feelings for him, when all she was looking for was a holiday fling.
When Ally returns home to Kittiwake Cove, she struggles to keep her conflicted feelings about more than one path not taken from bubbling to the surface. Determined to make the season a success for the sake of her father, she is just about holding it together. So the last thing she needs is for Logan to appear on her home turf, and set her emotions spiraling once more. It is time for Ally to make some big decisions about what she really wants...
Ah, what utter loveliness this book proved to be. Heidi Swain knows just how to pull you into a book with just the right mix of an escapist story in a gorgeous location, threaded with relatable themes, and with characters you can take to your heart - all wrapped up in a romantic bow! And she pulls this off in typical Swain-style in her larest gem, The Holiday Escape.
Ally is a great protagonist, pulled in two by the promise she made to her mother and her secret dreams, and nothing about the choices she must make is simple. As we get to know her, Swain does an excellent job of showing how she is grieving from not only the loss of a parent, but the life she thought she would be living, and this gives rise to layered storylines about forgiveness and unresolved feelings, that must be worked through before the heart-warming ending comes around - via all the necessary mishaps and misunderstandings along the way, of course.
I really enjoyed the multiple threads of gentle romance that run through this story, especially the clever twist that makes Ally reassess her feelings about the direction of her life through the eyes of Logan, and Swain builds in clever suspense around the will-they-won't-they element, as well as the nicely judged over-arching plotlines of deception and the weight of things unsaid. There are some cracking characters who spring from the pages to become living, breathing people (or foul-mouthed feathered friends), which makes the novel enjoyably cinematic - and their storylines have you chuckling, cheering, cussing, and crying in equal measure. Everything revolves beautifully around Swain's favourite topics of family, friendship, second chances, and a community pulling together in times of trouble - which just happen to be my favourite themes too!
This is one of those books you find yourself swallowing whole, completely tied to the fate of the characters until the emotional finale rolls around. I always know I am in for some powerful tugging of the heart strings when a new Heidi Swain book arrives, and The Holiday Escape hit that sentimental sweet-spot to perfection. I loved it!
The Holiday Escape is available to buy now in paperback, ebook and audio formats.
Thank you to Simon and Schuster for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to join this Books and the City blog tour.
About the author:
Heidi lives in beautiful west Norfolk. She is passionate about gardening, the countryside, collecting vintage paraphernalia and reading. Her tbr pile is always out of control!
Heidi loves to chat with her readers and you can get in touch via her website or on social media.
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