Mirrigold: Mutterings & Musings

After Felix by Lily Morton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I swear, every time I think I’ve found my favourite couple, Lily Morton writes me another pair that steal my heart.

Now, Caden and Malachi will never lose their place at the top because Hey, Lily wrote me a rare breeds farmer and so duh! (see Spring Strings)  but Felix and Max are now very firmly ensconced in second place.

I loved how this book took a different narrative style than most of Lily’s others, giving us a very definite book of two halves.

The first concerns all the build up to what we know from her other books, was a very painful split for Felix when Max broke his heart.

Here we get to see just how that came about and it was bittersweet to watch them falling in love without either of them being able to seize the moment and admit it.

The second half of the story gives us them back in each other’s orbits and, including flashbacks to scenes we’ve encountered from other perspectives in other stories, it really worked well to introduce the slow build up to them finding their way back to each other.

There’s the usual snark you’d expect from Lily, I’d nearly choked to death before the end of page one so thanks for that 😉 but there’s also a lot of pain and hurt.

Felix is an absolute delight and Max is nothing like the flighty, irresponsible character we saw in Zeb and Jesse’s book Best Man. Instead, he’s hiding his hurt away and he’s confused about his feelings for his best friend Ivo, who he’s always believed he was in love with.

The way this complicated and complex plot was navigated really impresses, there’s never a moment where you forget at what point in time you are, the recollections flow seamlessly into the present.

This book had unexpected happy memories for me too, as the first motorbike I ever went on was my Uncle Richard’s 850cc Norton Commando when I was five-years-old! Sitting on the petrol tank as he slowly rode around the block and sealed my love for two wheels.

Also Waterloo Bridge – he didn’t leave her so there! She thought he was dead in the war 🤪😁

#ARC kindly received from the author in return for an honest and unbiased review<.i>

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