Blog Tour | Finding Jess #review #giveaway @rararesources

The final book for this tour, it’s strange that it’s about to be over I’ve not read a series in such quick succession in a long time. If you missed the previous posts then here is my review for Drumbeats and Walking in the Rain and don’t forget there is a giveaway too.

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Single mother, Jess, has struggled to get her life back on track after the betrayal of her beloved husband and her best friend. When she is on the brink of losing everything, including her family and her job, she feels that she can no longer trust anyone. Then she is sent a mysterious newspaper clipping of a temporary post back in Ghana. Could this be her lifeline? Can Jess turn back time and find herself again? And what, exactly, will she find?

Finding Jess is a passionate story of love, betrayal and second chances – and of one woman’s bid to reclaim her self-belief and trust. It is a feel-good story of a woman’s strength and spirit rising above adversity.

Amazon | Goodreads

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I do feel a little lost now that I am at the end of this series since I read them over the space of a week I feel really invested in the characters and it’s almost strange that I won’t be checking back in with them.

I started on this book in a very similar vein to the last one Walking in the Rain, with a lot of anger. Anger because Simon, Jess’s ex-husband, is still causing her a lot of strife and because, to add to the misery, Jess’s ex-best friend Polly has now decided to muscle her way back into the fold, with some pretty dire consequences for Jess.

Words cannot tell you how much I despised Simon, the author has created the perfect most unlikeable character, and I was annoyed that he still had such an effect on Jess, that he was still able to control her in subtle ways even though he was no longer really a part of her life. I also still did not understand Polly’s motivations, her actions helped to further things for Jess in the story but I really wanted to understand why, why she suddenly had such a different personality than in book two, I do wish there had been some kind of explanation there.

There was also another little thing that I found a bit unusual, there were a number of flashbacks during the book, which of course are super helpful if you haven’t read the two previous books. However, if you have just read them you realise that large chunks of text have been copied from the previous books and pasted into this one. I just feel like these could have been a bit more natural so it wasn’t quite so jarring for people who have read all the books, I kept getting this horrid deja vu feeling and then I’d realise it was another flashback scene.

I am so glad that we got to go back and visit Ghana again in this book and it was nice to get the contrast of how it was when Jess was there originally and how it was in the modern day. I was happy to go back and visit the places that Jess had been in the first book and hear the stories of how characters we had met there had got on.

Also, I was completely over the moon to find out what happened to Jim, I was anxious to know whether their paths would meet once again, and was so grateful that they did. I couldn’t help but feel hopeful at his reappearance and glad that his days of secrecy were behind him.

Even though at the start of the book I was angry with certain characters and felt despair at the situations that Jess kept finding herself in, by the end of the book I was left with a wonderful feeling of optimism. It was nice to get to know Jess and I’m glad that she eventually had some happiness.

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If you think this is a series that you would be interested in and you live in the UK then you will want to click the link below for a chance to win…

a paperback copy of Drumbeats (book 1), book marks, post cards, key ring and handbag fob

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Today is the last day of the tour but I have reviews for all the books, that you can find links for at the end of this post, and here are all the other stops that you can peruse through.

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The Drumbeats Trilogy

The love of a woman and the story of a country.

It’s 1965 and 18 year old Jess escapes her stifling English background for a gap year in Ghana, West Africa. Over the next three evocative novels, follow her journey as she encounters new cultures and loves in this stirring series.

The Drumbeats Trilogy is a passionate saga of love, betrayal and second chances – and of one woman’s bid to reclaim her self-belief and trust. A feel-good up-lit story of a woman’s strength and spirit rising above adversity.

Buy the trilogy

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Award-winning author Julia Ibbotson is fascinated by the medieval world and concepts of time travel. She read English at Keele University, England (after a turbulent but exciting gap year in Ghana, West Africa) specialising in medieval language, literature and history, and has a PhD in socio-linguistics.

She wrote her first novel at 10 years of age, but became a school teacher, then a university lecturer and researcher. Finding Jess (2018) is her sixth book and the last of the Drumbeats trilogy (which begins and ends in Ghana). Apart from insatiable reading, she loves travelling the world, singing in choirs, swimming, yoga and walking in the countryside in England and Madeira where she and her husband divide their time.

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Reviews of other Julia Ibbotson books

Drumbeats | Walking in the Rain

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Big thanks to Rachel @ Rachel’s Random Resources and Julia Ibbotson for inviting me to be part of the tour.

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