I started reading at 11am on Sunday and finished the 350+ pages of *The Blue Hour some six hours later, I couldn't put this page turner down - in parts it made me cry in others just sad, I had such a love hate relationship with both 'leading ladies' Tilly and Ava.
Here is my review about a book written in Wrington, North Somerset, whose characters inhabit God's Own County - Cornwall and the Thames valley straddled land of the Home Counties.
Oh my. The posh Padstow boil-in-the-bag fish ‘n’ chips made my bunioned feet recoil with its descriptions of decay and delight.
It is Country Girls meets Maleficent mixed with modernity - a wartime romance which matures into hot cocoa at bedtime with buttock tensing foreplay.
A hot diaphoresis, this is a motherfooker of a book, that mixes a heady cocktail of booze, fags and chewable food.
An 89 million year old harridan and a scorned 30-something become ‘needs must’ roomies in a mix of Cornish sights, sounds and smells.
It is all spliced and spiced with flora, flirting, unfaithfulness, edible seafood and an aged, somewhat malicious/mischievous, older woman and her fear-of-flying young female carer.
Senses drip in the descriptions of sweat, catwalk sashays, peed beds and diets.
Can’t watch another afternoon tv ad for incontinence pads, sagging skin cream or the opium of the people shite reality/game shows with Z-list celebs.
Our aged anti-heroine is ‘challenging, rude and an enigma’ which is code for being a bit of a bitch softened (or penis-style flaccid) when the word ‘pitiful’ is whispered.
Old age certainly does not become her but her flirtatious youth did.
After the country dancing there are some even more surprising twists and turns to the story which stays gripping to the ‘bitter sweet’ end.
The Blue Hour by MJ Greenwood is available in paperback priced £7.91 from Amazon.
I did recognise Danesfield House having stayed there long after the USAF and George and Amal Clooney"s wedding party and my RAF father was stationed at Bomber Command with the Yanks at High Wycombe.
The pub down the road from Danesfield is called the Dog and Badger but is The White Hart in the book.
The Dog and Badger is now a boutique bed and breakfast.
Danesfield House is infamous for our 'grand' bar bill during our stay at the beginning on the new millennium when our nephew was food and beverage manager.
The Blue Hour is former Nailsea resident Melanie Greenwood’s brilliant debut novel and draws on her own childhood memories and time spent in the features department of the Bristol Post.
She also worked with me at the Clevedon Mercury.
So proud of all the former staff that have fine-tuned their journalistic skills into writing and getting published a book - no mean feat.

​Carol Deacon

* According to Wikipedia The blue hour occurs when the Sun is far enough below the horizon so that the sunlight's blue wavelengths dominate due to the Chappuis absorption caused by ozone. Since the term is colloquial, it lacks an official definition similar to dawn, dusk, and the three stages of twilight. Rather, it refers to a state of natural lighting that usually occurs around the nautical stage of the twilight period.