I was unable to finish this book. It just did not spark anything within me to keep reading past the first 15% of the book.
Perhaps a symptom of my mood during pandemic.

No publication of this review

When I ran away is the story of a mother who has immigrated from Staten Island/NY for her husband to live in London.

Gigi has two sons and the youngest is still a small baby. One day, after feeling so overwhelmed with life she walks out of the door away from her family.

From the first chapter I was instantly drawn in by the book. Describing the events of the 9/11 attack on the twin towers, the story came to life and the suspense encouraged me to keep reading.

Gigi is a relatable character, before giving birth to her youngest she was confident, loud and outgoing. Since the traumatic birth of her baby she felt the complete opposite.

I have three children and the emotions in which GiGi was feeling throughout the book, I have felt at sometime. Her emotions and feelings really resonated with me in regards to having a brand-new baby. I'm sure every mother at some point has felt the way Gigi has felt and wanted to take a break.

I enjoyed this book and I felt it had the powerful message of Motherhood being one of the most hardest things a human can do. Behind closed doors everyone is fighting their own battles and it's not as easy as others may make out.

A complicated story of Gigi Stanislawski and what happened to her life after the twin towers collapsed.on that horrific day Gigi ran from her office straight to the Staten Island ferry to get to Staten Island where her parents lived. She was on the ferry with the other ash covered and shocked passengers When she saw someone she recognised from the coffee shop near her office. He was kind and looked after her his name was Harry and he was a Londoner in Manhattan working for a while. When they arrive at the house they they all waited for a call or message from Gigi’s brother. The call never comes and they feared the unthinkable that he was killed. After this Harry returns to London. Ten years later when life is not so great for Gigi she bumps into Harry they fall madly in love and Gigi moves to London to be with Harry. Things are not running smoothly in London and Gigi finds herself pregnant in a different city missing her friends and family.
How will it all turn out, well worth a read to find out.

This book tells the story of Gigi who meets Harry someone she has seen at her local coffee shop a few times, on the worst day of her family’s life on 9/11 when they escape on the Staten Island Ferry. Unfortunately her brother is not so lucky.

They meet again a few years later and fall in love and marry and have a baby and move back to the UK. Gigi is a single Mum when they meet again.

The story tells how Gigi struggles with a traumatic birth, new life in a new country, and one day walks out on her life.

The book is well written but I just couldn’t get into it but can not pinpoint why. It is well written and a good debut, perhaps it was the characters, or the subject matter or maybe my mood, I don’t know.

This is a raw, hard, honest and VERY emotionally difficult read. I found myself completely attached to Gigi, and thus her traumatic birth to her baby were triggering an hit home for me. The writing and character development around this is exceptional. Gigi's decent into a severe mental health crisis was covered with care and accuracy; a character that represents modern day motherhood.
I found the timeline confusing to begin with so less stars for this, however I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

I am not sure how to write about this book. I thought it was so thought provoking, sad and happy in equal measure really. Gigi goes through her early life with difficulty parent wise mainly. The Twin Towers being blown up changes the course of her life completely when her brother dies and she adopts his little boy Johnny. They rub along together really well and she is very happy bringing him up. In steps Harry. She met him once before on the day the Twin Towers fell and he was very kind to her and her family but disappeared. She had always thought about him and they begin a relationship. Harry has a promotion back to the UK and Gigi goes with him. She struggles with the UK culture and misses her friends desperately. Eventually they have a child who they call Rocky. The birth was so traumatic and Gigi cannot bond with the baby and her life spirals downwards very fast. The book is about the postnatal depression she suffers and the difficulty in finding the right sort of help even though the help she would have accepted and needed were her friends in the States. The ending works well and I felt happy things will work out for her as she is pulled from the depths of despair by her husband and friends. Lovely story as I have said and feel this is a story that happens far too much in today’s society

I need to read some cheerful books as recently I’m not finding any joy in the books I’m choosing. This book made me sad but not enough to feel for the story.

This book is raw, reading some paragraphs was hard. Topics such as postnatal depression, grief and living far away from family and friends are talked about with no filter.

Gigi and Harry first met on the day the Twin Towers collapsed, then they meet again after several years and realise that they have been both wondering what if. Harry, irresistible with his British accent, asked Gigi to move back to London with him, where he has been offered a new position. She accepts, but her idyllic new life is far from it, especially after the arrival of their first baby. Will their relationship survive when Gigi ran away from.home, overwhelmed by it all?

On the day the twin towers collapse Gigi is at work, she bumps into Harry, a man she has seen in their local coffee shop. He has nowhere to go so she takes him back to her parents house, where she waits to hear if her brother Frankie is safe. Unfortunately Frankie wasn’t so lucky and Harry Is there to comfort and help the family come to terms with the shocking news.

We fast forward eleven years when Gigi and Harry are surprisingly reunited, they fall in love and move to London.

Reading this book brought back the feeling of disbelieve and terror I felt when watching the news on 9/11. I thought it was written beautifully and although it portrays death and depression there is also hope!!

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy in exchange for a review.

I found this difficult to read at times as it brought back a lot of memories of my own traumatic birth experience and gigs grief and her battle with postnatal depression were so real and raw. A very well written book.

I identified in some way with the portrayal of a woman who has disappeared after havinga child- how do you get back to feeling like yourself?
Also I recognised how the loss of loved one unexpectedly, and in this case in a tragic event watched by the world, can shape your future, and how difficult it is to get over.

Insightful and relatable read.

The split timeline helped the story flow and built a good picture around the circumstances and really makes you care about the main character.

Harry enters Gigi's life just as it's about to shatter, like the twin towers that have just been hit and are soon to fall. Fleeing from the devastation, only brief acquaintances, Gigi takes Harry to her home, to her brash mother and kind father, and comforts them all as they discover that Gigi's brother was in those towers and didn't make it out alive.
11 years later, a chance encounter brings Gigi and Harry together again and sparks instantly fly, but life is complicated. Gigi is raising someone else's child, and living in a run down apartment, struggling to make ends meet, while Harry is a wealthy business man with a pretty girlfriend, who makes Gigi look a right mess, but to Harry none of that matters.

Soon Gigi's whole life has changed, her and Johnny are moving to England, to live with Harry, who she married in a hurry and suddenly they have money, a beautiful home and another baby on the way, but is it enough?

This is a beautiful, raw, heart breaking, emotional rollercoaster of a book. That deals with the difficult subject of postnatal depressing in a way that is astounding. I heart bled for Gigi, as she flees her family and desperately tries to wrestle with her emotions.

How she deals with the people around her and their responses and expectancies of her as a mother, their judgements and attempts to prove their own worth as mothers. It shows how often, instead of lifting each other up as women should, we often shoot each other down in order to justify our own choices and actions.

This book is deep, raw and for anyone who has suffered any kind of depression, PTSD or Anxiety, it is incredibly enlightening. Because it shows that you are not alone, that others feel this way too, and that life is tough.

Ilona has an amazing talent with words and it is as if she has cracked open the thought patterns of those struggling in this life and emptied them out onto the page in a beautiful way, that will make you cry, cringe, laugh and long for her characters and connect you to the story in away that other books cannot.

I cannot recommend this book enough, especially for any of you out there who have struggled, whether mothers or not. And I also recommend it for everyone else too. So they can be enlightened as to the struggles others face with their mental health. Something everyone needs to learn more about, so that the world can become a more compassionate place.

As always a bit thank you to NetGalley, Ilona Bannister and her publishers for allowing me to read this one for free in exchange for an honest review.

Incredibly raw and at times darkly comic portrayal of loss, grief, postnatal depression and the value of friendship. For fans of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette and Sarah Haywood's The Cactus.

This is a good read about love, parenthood and postnatal depression. It is a hard read in places as Gigi tries to cope but there is some humour thrown in as well.

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy.

I must confess that this was a slow begining for me, but I stick with it. And I am happy I did.
This was hard but good read. This was a story about parenthood. This book deals with mental health.
3.5 stars

I love how real this story is, the language, the classism, the sheer differences between Brits and Americans. Even though I am not a parent, I was able to relate to the character's frustrations, mental health issues, and effects of her environment. Definitely one I'll recommend to my friends, especially the ones who are parents.

Gigi Stanislawski has run away. Left her husband in charge of two boys and is now watching daytime television in a run down hotel and not answering her phone.
Gigi met her husband when the twin towers collapsed and he took her home to her parents and she found her brother had died. He left that day and it was 10 years when she bumped into him again.
She has now left America to live with him in London but its not going well. She misses her old life and friends.
She wants it to work though but she needs to find out how.

On the day when the twin towers are collapsing Gigi Stanislawski is fortunate to escape the horrifying drama that is unfolding in lower Manhattan. Together with Harry Harrison, a stranger she’s glimpsed in the local coffee shop, they board the Staten Island ferry back to Gigi’s parents home and await news of the whereabouts of her brother Frankie. When it’s apparent Frankie has become yet another casualty of this atrocity it is the Englishman Harry who comforts Gigi and her family through the initial shock, the pair never crossing paths again until eleven years later thanks to a chance encounter. Falling madly in love, Gigi follows Harry back overseas to London and I’d like to be able to say they lived happily ever after except When I Ran Away isn’t that type of novel!

The initial scenes detailing the immediate hours in the aftermath of the tragedy are beautifully written and profoundly moving with a promise of more to come. Whilst Harry and Gigi’s subsequent love story, beautiful though it is, fills your heart with gladness I’d prefer to focus on an event further down the line,the traumatic birth of baby Rocky. It is this event which pushes Gigi over the edge of the precipice in terms of her mental wellbeing culminating in her split second decision to walk out of the family home without a backward glance. As she hides away in a cheap London hotel room, drinking and binge watching Real Housewives, Gigi recalls her life since Frankie’s death and the events that have lead to this present moment in time.

Books can transport you to many places but Gigi’s story hit a raw nerve within me forcing me to travel back in time nearly twenty years ago when I became a mother. Experiencing post natal depression and then becoming a single mother I can’t pretend that my own personal experiences were on a par with Gigi’s. What I can say is that even if I only felt a fraction of the emotions engulfing Gigi then I can totally understand and feel her pain too. The lack of control, the loss of identity, the guilt that forever plagues you in terms of being a good enough mother resonated with me. Every word penned by this author, detailing Gigi’s dramatic decision and the fallout from it is packed with raw emotion ,literally taking my breath away. I cannot remember ever reading a more honest account, albeit fictional, of a mother’s descent into depression than this one. To me Gigi is an amalgamation of every mother on this planet. Her rage and her hatred towards Harry and her current circumstances together with her homesickness and isolation, her despair and hopelessness permeate every page. All I wanted to do was comfort her, saddened that maybe her love for Harry and Johnny wouldn’t be big enough to survive her breakdown. I felt this women had been running away all her life, not only from her grief for brother Frankie but from her caring responsibilities she shoulders from an early age. First her little brother, then her mother, abandoned baby Johnny and finally baby Rocky which leaves her depleted in every sense. Yet underneath all the negative emotions that cause Gigi to stage her own rebellion, there lies a woman with a huge capacity to care, nurture and cherish. By the time I came to the final page it was as if I knew this woman inside out, that Gigi was not a figment of the author’s imagination but a living and breathing soul whom I cared about immensely.

Apart from all the anguish and soul searching, this novel is surprisingly full of humour of the acerbic kind. I loved Gigi’s observations of the weirdness of the British way of life, our stiff upper lip demeanour and the falseness of all the highly competitive yummy mummies she comes into contact with. Life here is worlds away from Gigi’s American life with girlfriends who are equally as loud and brash as the English are buttoned up and polite. Plus the loveable Johnny delighted me with his dialogue between himself and his beloved Jeej.

When I Ran Away is a stunning debut novel that is powerful and emotive. I read much of it with a lump in my throat, interspersed with a smile, a wry grin and a chuckle or two. The storyline speaks volumes to anyone who’s ever struggled with similar feelings or considered turning their back on life as a mother, even if only for a second. I hope my effusive praise of this debut novel will encourage you to read the book, but all that really needs to be said is just WOW!!! WOW!!! WOW!!!
My thanks as always to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read.

Traumatic events shape Gigi, losing her beloved brother Frankie in the twin towers disaster. Connecting with Harry on the same day, is he part of her nightmare or her saviour.
Meeting up again ten years later. Moving from new York to the UK. Having a baby, anniversary looming it all becomes to much for Gigi.
She retreats to a hotel and replays everything in her mind. A bold and painful book about not connecting with a new born and feeling inadequate.