Title : Beautiful Day
Author : Kate Anthony
Publication date : 10th April 2014
Publisher : Penguin Michael Joseph
Purchase eBook: Kindle
Purchase paper book: Amazon
Rating : 3.5 out of 5 LeeLee’s!
Today is the day that things are going to change for Rachel Bidewell.
She will walk through the doors of Clifton Avenue Care Home and start a new life. Rachel is returning to work. And as she discovers, juggling a new job, three children and an ex husband can feel like drowning.
Someone needs to throw her a lifeline…
Philip doesn’t seem like an obvious lifesaver. He has just lost the one person who ever cared for him and, even as an adult, he doesn’t know how to live in the real world.
But might Philip and Rachel each have something the other needs?
This is a story of unexpected friendship; of the messy, muddy territory of those broken by life – and what it takes to fix them. It reminds us that the very darkest of days can be funny, heart-warming and even beautiful.
My Thoughts
Rachel Bidewell can only be described as bitter… Her world is turned upside down when her husband and father of their three children, – Alec, Luke and Jess, – leaves them for another woman. Struggling to make ends meet while he is living a new life Rachel is forced to go back to work and support herself. Taking everything in her stride Rachel heads off to work in a local residential care home where she is assigned as key worker to Philip, a grown man with learning difficulties. Philip has lived a sheltered life with his mother, hidden from the outside world for goodness knows how long, nobody knows his age, he can’t brush his own teeth and his people skills are non existant. Rach is in over her head and Philip is the only one keeping her going in her new role at Clifton Avenue, that is until heartless care home manager Denise steps in and starts to destroy any progress they have made.
Beautiful day is told in the first person by the main protagonist Rachel, this allows you to get a real sense of how she is feeling throughout, from her bitter twisted attitude towards Deborah, the younger woman her husband abandoned his family for, to the moment of elated joy when Philip brushes his own teeth for the first time. Kate Anthony writes such a realistic account of Rachel’s work in the care home and everyday incidents they face that you can really see the authors background of working as a residential social worker shine through in her writing. Following each event from Rachel’s perspective really brings home how much everything has affected their family, although I would have liked to hear a little of what Dom and Deborah thought at times I think not hearing their side of things automatically makes you take Rachels side.
I found the first half of the book to be a little repetitive as it very much evolved around the unhappy single mother who is forced to go back to work, it could be a little depressing at times, especially when you think these are everyday struggles that people in the real world are facing. However this didn’t put me off, if anything it left me rooting for Rachel more as the plot developed.
Verdict
This is a heartwarming tale of love, friendship and family. Touching on many themes from divorce to the bureaucracy of social services alongside the challenges of being a single parent and still keeping up with the school PTA, Kate Anthony has managed to write about an array of serious subjects whilst also giving it a light hearted side showing it’s not always bad. The characters and events are written so well I felt rather compelled to follow Rachel on her journey in hope that things would turn around for her.
As her debut novel this is of course the first novel I have read by Kate Anthony and hopefully it won’t be my last!
