The Longest Holiday

Reading this made me want to plan a vacation ASAP! This was a first from Paige Toon for me & it wont be my last. I loved it. It had all the feels (though I couldve had steamier sex scenes – but its ok, maybe its not this authors thing). It was wonderfully written, fully developed story, deeply interesting characters & a setting that made me want to hit up Deltas app & book a flight!

For a little while there, Laura Perry had it all after losing so much.

Years ago her first love, Formula One champion Will Trust, died in a car racing accident. And then Laura met Matthew Perry; a journalist with beautiful blue eyes and she found love again. They were married shortly after meeting, and had been enjoying a blissful marriage of seven months when a Facebook message ruins it all. Turns out, Matthew drunkenly cheated on Laura at his stag do. He shagged a girl in the toilets and now this Tessa is contacting him (conveniently remembering his name-association with TV show `Friends’) to say that she’s pregnant. Seven months pregnant, and he’s the father. Laura suddenly finds herself a blushing new bride with a husband who is going to have a baby with another woman. And Matthew, being a good man, wants to be part of the baby’s life. He doesn’t want to be an absentee dad.

The only thing for Laura to do is run far, far away from London – to Key West, to be precise, with her best friend Marty and tag-along Bridget.

Laura spends lazy days by the beach, drinking too much and trying not to fall apart at every text message Matthew sends, begging her to come home and sort things out with him.

And then Laura meets Leo – a local diving instructor. He has movie-star good looks and secrets behind his piercing eyes. As Laura gets dangerously closer to him, she starts to wonder if he’s a distraction from the destruction of her life – or something more? It doesn’t help that all her friends and family are begging her to come home and choose Matthew, but what she feels for Leo can’t be so easily dismissed …

`The Longest Holiday’ is the new novel from romance writer, Paige Toon.

You’d think I wouldn’t touch another Paige Toon novel with a ten-foot pole, after giving the laughably lacklustre `Pictures of Lily’ a 1.5/5 rating back in 2011. But, here I am, the Queen of wishful thinking.

I glimpsed the premise of `The Longest Holiday’ and was intrigued because it reminded me, bizarrely, of Melina Marchetta’s `The Piper’s Son.’ My favourite character in that book is Georgie, a woman who is 42 and pregnant to Sam, the man who cheated on her seven years ago and got a child out of his indiscretion. I loved them, and despite their rocky road they are amongst the most romantic couplings I’ve ever read. Their entire history intrigued me, and I loved the messy heartbreak they both had to overcome to be together. So, in reading this blurb it was less the Key West & Leo stuff that had me pushing past my last Paige Toon disappointment, and giving this book a chance … except (and I really shouldn’t be surprised by this) Toon herself is more intrigued with the boring, easy, mushy Leo stuff and that’s what the book focuses on. More’s the pity.

`The Longest Holiday’ starts from the moment Laura is on the plane, heading into Key West. She’s clearly fragile and weepy, unable to escape her mind ticking over Matthew’s cheating and the bundle of `joy’ that’s to be a constant reminder of it. For the first few chapters Laura is understandably mopey while in Key West sunshine. But then she meets Leo and is dazzled by his movie-star good looks (Toon categorizes ad nauseum; his bulging arm muscles and Pavlov’s Abs that trigger Laura’s drool every time he gets shirtless…). Leo is a local dive instructor with a Cuban background and a ramshackle house that sits beside Laura’s hotel. He lives with his hodge-podge family: a half-brother, sister-in-law, nephew and a dog. Laura is intrigued, and when she opts for dive lessons she gets ever closer to him … until the time comes when she has to return to the UK. But just as she’s about to get on board the plane, Matthew rings to say his baby son has been born. Laura cannot cope, and so decides to spend her entire summer in Key West, determinedly dodging her awaiting heartbreak in the UK. In deciding to stay, she also inadvertently decides to see if she and Leo have more than just chemistry between them…

Look, I’m of the belief that readers quite like to poke at character’s bruises. There’s just something torturously delectable about reading someone else’s heavily fractured life – and infidelity plots are the best types of fictional itches to scratch. And Laura’s is particularly gruesome and intriguing. But Toon barely touches on it. Instead, Laura ignores texts from Matthew or plays a loop of the same conversation with him “I need space. I need time. I’m not coming home.” Now, on the one hand I really wanted Laura to go home and yell at Matthew. I wanted to poke that bruise of hers and see her back in the UK as her life and love slowly unravels … But on the other hand, Toon doesn’t really make Matthew that appealing a suitor. I think she tried to put Laura between a rock and a (rock hard abs) place, but Leo and Matthew are very unbalanced. Leo’s all brooding secrets and movie-star good looks, while Matthew’s just the drip who keeps interrupting sexy times with his text messages and is a broken record saying “I love you, Laura. Come home, Laura.” Gag. Toon tries to bring some appeal to Matthew through abysmal flashbacks of `happier times’ – but they left me cold and distant, too short to mean anything to me, and too vapid to mean anything to Laura.

That being said, in relation to Laura I didn’t find Matthew appealing. But by himself? Well, I’d actually quite like to read his story and the complications of having a baby with your one-night-stand that contributed to the end of your marriage with the woman you love. Toon, I think, hints at a possible trajectory for Matthew in that he went to Uni with Tessa’s sister (Argh! Wouldn’t that be a tricky love triangle) – and even though I’ve now had two misses with her, if she was to write a book about Matthew, I’d probably read it.

`The Longest Holiday’ failed big time for me on two HUGE counts. One is that Laura is quite vapid and useless. There’s much made of the fact that loving Matthew helped her out of her depression over Will dying. Now we meet her when loving Leo helps her out of her depressive spiral over the end of her marriage to Matthew. She’s portrayed as entirely dependent on men (and really, really ridiculously good looking ones, at that – shallow much?).

The second thing was the ending – which is laughably soap opera dramatic and sudden. Never mind that the big twist isn’t even properly concluded, but rather jumped to a clunky epilogue that sweeps everything Toon didn’t seem able to cover under the rug.

You’d think I’ve learned my lesson about Paige Toon … but as I said, if she has a novel for Matthew up her sleeve I’ll probably read it, because his story was a million times more juicy and delicious than sad-sap, male-dependent Laura’s could ever be. Props for setting up Matthew’s twistingly complicated story, but that’s about it.

Okay, I need to say this. Poor Laura. Poor, poor Laura.
One of the things I love in Paiges books is how she revisit earlier characters from her other books. In this case Laura, the maincharacter, is the same Laura from Chasing Daisy. To people who have not read Chasing Daisy, I will short tell her prestory, and beware it will be a spoiler. She was the girlfriend to racedriver Will Trust. They were friends and sweethearts from an early age. The perfect IT couple. After he dies in a car accident, she is left with dealing with her sorrow, guilt, and how sorry people she doesn’t know feels for her. Some even write a song about her and Will. It is really sad. So it’s no wonder that she doubts that she ever will be able to smile, and feel happy again. But then she meets Matthew, and he changes the world for her. She falls madly in love with him.
Matthew will be an another character you already know too. He is mentioned in One Perfect Summer, and one of those things I loved about him, is how nice and gentle he is. I bet that was the excact same thing Laura fell for. He is one of those character that never will do anything to hurt an another person. But something do happen, and this is what The Longest Holiday is about.
Matthew gets very drunk on his stag, and somehow he meets a girl. One thing leads to the other, and they end up having sex in the clubs toilet. After 7 months of more than happy marriage with Matthew, Laura one day suddenly see a message from this girl telling Matthew that she is pregnant with his child. The world fall crashing down at her feets. She is humiliated, angry, and can’t deal with the fact that her husband is to be a father to an another womans child.

By picking exact these characters out I feel you got a prestory, so you understand the hurt Laura must be feeling, when her perfect husband suddenly isn’t so perfect anymore. And the confusion both he and Laura must feel onto how something like this could happen. I know I was confused and angry how Matthew could let things go that wild on his stag.

NOTE: the story can easily be read if you haven’t read Chasing Daisy, and One Perfect Summer. You will just learn the characters to know on a different way, but it is not a necessity.

Matthew hates the situation. He is in danger of losing Laura. The girl he loves more than anything. But because of his good nature he of course wants to be a part of the childs life too. Something Laura find difficult to deal with – his mistake will be an eternal reminder to her in the shape of a child – so when some of her friends offer her to tag along on a vacation to the Keys Islands she follows them. She needs distance to think this through, and learn how to deal with how her life now will be.
And this is what The Longest Holiday is about. Will Laura learn how to deal with it, and go back to Matthew? Will she be able to forgive him?

But Leo, a scuba diver, Laura meets, will complicate the things a bit more. She is very attracted to him, and when she needs more time to think, he let her move into his house that he share with his family.
Leo is all that she needs. Someone that understands, and reassures her. But Leo will come with his own past, and Laura changes his vision on life too. I like the metaphor with Leo’s house that are almost falling apart, and that Laura repair it to get it back to what it once was. And like Laura, you will fall just as much in love with Leo as she does.

But Laura learns that no matter how far away you go, the problems will always follow you. When Laura goes back to England she has to face Matthew, – her best friend and lover that fights for her though out the whole book. I love how Matthew is written in such a compassionate way – he isn’t turned into a villian, and when she is with Matthew all the good they had together, and how easy it still is, when she doesn’t think of his mistake, do plays a role, and why it is that you keep guessing through the whole book onto who she will chose. Leo might just have been a part of her escape, and nothing more.

I really enjoyed reading The Longest Holiday. Paige understands to write a love story that captures you. One thing Paige is also great at doing is writing place descriptions and get the aura feeling into her story. I could hear the latin music in the background, smell the cigar smoke, and feel the sun on my skin while I was reading. I have never been to the Keys Island, but while I was reading, I traveled there.

A great beach/summer read with a story that not will be easy all the time.

This was my first Paige Toon novel and I couldn’t put it down. I’m a sucker for chick-lit, especially British chick-lit and it was everything that I could have hoped for. Dynamic, relateable characters and an excellent storyline. I look forward to reading more of her books!

I’ve read all of Paige Toons books and I’ve loved every one of them. This was no exception, Toon has a very easy way or writing that, for me, pulls me right in straight away.

I read this book pretty fast and I don’t want to give anything away – just if you like her previous books this won’t disappoint.
Warning: I did feel, however, that towards the end it started to drag out a little but other then that this is a fantastic read.

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