A bunch of thoroughly unlikeable characters spend time making each other miserable in pursuit of personal gain - loved the painful and embarrassing situations, the neediness of Ada to belong and the treachery of the people she wants to belong to. The snobbery and the neediness of most of the characters makes for a messy story that unravels the worst bits of a certain type of British society - read it and wonder at the same time what would you do to belong?

I found this to be a 2* OK read.

Ada is the main character and is very unlikeable; this doesn't help make the story flow or, for me, engage me fully. There are obvious synergies with The Talented Mr Ripley as Ada ingratiates herself within a group of rich, snobbish, entitled individuals. There's alot of information and characters, so, you need to be on your toes.

However, the Italian descriptions are dreamy and it's worth sticking with it but not really for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to preview.

This book was an enjoyable read. I raced through it in a matter of days and loved the sense of atmosphere and descriptions of Italy. It really did create a perfect background for a plot of deception and secrets.

I enjoyed the sense of mystery and intrigue, but based on the book’s description, I expected the death to play a larger part in the story than it did. I couldn’t help but spend the first section of the book waiting for the suspicious death to occur, and then the rest of the book waiting for it to really matter. That being said, the main plot which focused on Ada’s efforts to ‘get back’ to the social position she believed she deserved was interesting.

Ada was a highly dislikeable character though, as a narrator, her motives were always clear. I kept switching between finding her offputtingly annoying and enjoying her misguided attempts at social climbing. It was nice however to see someone entering the world of the rich elite not from a position of naivety but through obsession, manipulation and sense of entitlement. Although not a pleasant character, Ada’s characterisation was extremely well-done. The way she wished to manipulate everyone as if in a book and was so single-minded about getting back to her ‘roots’, despite how this made her appear to others, was very well developed.

Sadly, the ending of the book felt rushed which was disappointing. The whole book covers a span of just over 10 years so whilst it was interesting seeing the characters develop and mature, I wish some of the action was more evenly spread throughout.

When she was thirteen years old, Ada Howell lost not just her father, but the life she felt she was destined to lead. Now, at eighteen, Ada is given a second chance when her wealthy godmother gifts her with an extravagant art history trip to Italy.

The writing style was simply beautiful. I loved the details of the art and description of Italy. I believe that if one had never been, the author would have done a good enough job to describe it so that you would be able to believe you had been.

Ada has been bought up in an old house in Wales. With the death of her step-father, Ada's mother is forced to sell the property and move to London.
She jumps at the chance to go to Italy on an Art trip and to spend time with Dilettante, a group of young, well off people of her own age. This is the life that Ada believes she was due to have.
Ada tries her best to fit in with this group and when a member of the group dies in mysterious circumstances, she sees the opportunity of binding herself with them forever. .

I’m afraid this book wasn’t one for me. I found it slow and I lost interest in the story. But I did enjoy the settings, which were well described.

I loved reading this book, i foudn it engaging, i loved the way the author set the scenes especially in Italy, very romantic.....A good story about how life can change and how you can over come things that happen when you are younger. Loved the characters although there were a lot to remember at times.
Would recommend.

A beautifully slow burn of a book, lush Italian settings, oozing atmosphere and sophistication. Family secrets are hidden away, jealousy and deceit abounds.. Full of strong characters and tricky situations, this is a book to savour

I can see this as a great film or tv drama with beautiful Italian locations and beautiful, privileged people with dark desires. I enjoyed it but didn't want to linger purely because I really could not find anything to like in any of the characters. Ada does make a good narrator though - totally unreliable and self-obsessed. Well written, entertaining and twisty.

This is a rite of passage kind of book. When Ada's dad dies, her mum sells the family home as she is unable to maintain it. In an effort cheer her up before going to university, she joins a Art History tour in Italy paid for by her godmother. She is hoping to build up a network of friends and contacts. For the first third of the book, I found that the many references to artworks and art appreciation would have gone over my head without Google to aid visualising them, but the pace picked up with the inevitable twist at the end.
The characters and plot were believable although I did not like several of them, I could identify with them.

The Favour is clever, it draws the reader in gradually with a slow burn and then even when you think you know, you don't! I really can't say much about the plot as I wouldn't want to spoil it, but I will say, persevere. Part one is a little slow. But from part two onwards, I was intrigued and really enjoyed it. An intelligent and sophisticated plot-line, full of intriguing and flawed characters which will keep you guessing til the last page.

I loved the amount of research necessary to produce this book, although it is obviously the author's known subject. I chose this book because I love Venice and know it well, and was pleased to see that the author had not mashed it up as so many other authors do; research and a map had obviously been used - great!
I did enjoy reading this, as well as well researched, it was well written, and would happily look for any others that this author chose to write. I didn't give it five stars because I thought the author missed a moment of possible high drama - why would the main protagonist go out onto a balcony near the end? I hate spoilers but I don't think I gave anything away just then! Aside from that, no complaints from me.

This is a good read that takes your imagination on a trip to Italy.
When Ada finds herself with the opportunity to go to Italy she sees it as a way to get a second chance at the wealthy life that she feels should always have been hers.
Desperate to belong she tries to be part of the group until a favour puts her right in the middle and she permanently binds herself to this group of socialites.
Ada does everything in her power to prove that she is one of them, but can she convince them?
This is a slow burner, but you could say it gives the reader plenty of time to get a feel for the many relationships within the novel.
Thanks to Atlantic Books/Corvus and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

I enjoyed this book - I found it engaging and kept my interested. The description of Italy especially was evocative and made me want to return to Venice. None of the characters were particularly likeable - I'm sure that was intentional and it's a salutary tale of what people will do to fit in with the crowd, especially if you're social climbing. It was difficult to keep up with who was who in the group sometimes especially on the kindle where you can't flick backwards and forwards easily.

The Favour is a brilliant thriller reminiscent of The Talented Mr Ripley, The Secret History and If We Were Villains. A campus novel without the campus, dark academia themes abound in the settings of Italy, history, art, literature and the nature of privilege. We follow Ada, middle class but with wistful memories of a childhood on a Welsh estate with her obscure writer father, who is sent on a gap year art history trip to Italy by her godmother. Determined to use the opportunity to ingratiate herself with the group, who are all wealthy and upper class, Ada must use all her guile, until a sinister turn of events changes the rules. The story was great and the morals are grey here, with your sympathies changing throughout. Whilst some of the side characters are slightly less fleshed out, this fits with Ada's singlemindedness in pursuit of her goal. I highly recommend this novel.

Novels with a flawed character as the protagonist have been well done in the past (I am thinking here of 'The Woman in the Window' or 'The Girl on the Train') but to draw readers into a novel that has a flawed sociopathic character is a different skill altogether that the author of 'The Favour' pulls off magnificently.
The sociopathic protagonist that drives this book is Ada who is obsessed with class and whose overriding ambition is to re-join the the wealthy elite she feels she belonged to before her adoptive father’s death. When Ada’s godmother treats her to an art history trip around Italy, where she will be in the company of people who meet Ada’s elitist definition, she cannot believe her luck. As the novel is presented in Ada’s narrative voice, her compulsive scheming, lying, blackmail and deceit occasionally become difficult to bear – at times I found myself wishing for another, more likeable, character to take over just to get a break from Ada, but Vaughan’s skill is making you overcome such antipathy and to read on and on. The narrative, which covers the Italian trip first and then, at greater speed, the ensuing years, is unusual, but one fantastic structural element is the epilogue when we get a final close-up of just the fallible Ada. A definite five stars from me for this novel, and my sincere thanks go to the publishers and to NetGalley for the ARC provided to be in return for this honest and unbiased review.

I found this book a compelling read, with a clever and well-written story. I didn't really enjoy it, however, as almost all the characters were completely unlikeable, and I didn't really care what happened to any of them, including Ada the protagonist. As my circumstances are very different from those of the well-heeled main characters, I have no idea whether this is an accurate portrayal of the lifestyles of the rich and well-connected, but none of them really came alive for me. Perhaps it would make a better film, as the descriptions of Italy were ravishing.

I did enjoy this book, and returned to it every evening happily, but it felt quite slow all the way through - though in some ways just cleverly paced as I never lost interest. The writing is great and painfully observant. There is a final twist and reveal which was a bit disappointing and stereotypical but this is an interesting and unusual read.

I almost gave up on this book at the start as I didn’t care about the characters, struggled to muster any interest in the spoilt 'dilettantes' touring Italy and couldn’t understand why the main protagonist was so desperate to fit in with them. However, encouraged by the cinematic quality of the writing, I carried on and am so so glad I did because the story soared in the second half and I was hooked. A beautifully written, gripping, and ultimately satisfying novel.

The majority of the characters in this book are thoroughly unlikable. Ada wants to belong to the in-crowd, she wants to have friends for life but only the right sort of friends. I couldn't find one redeeming feature of her character.

The rejection by Oxford came as a bit of a shock to Ada Howell: she was, after all, the daughter of the renowned author, Anthony Howell, who'd been to this college. Well, she wasn't actually Howell's daughter: he'd married her mother after her birth and had then adopted her, so she was 'chosen' rather than just 'made', which was better really. And whilst we're being honest, we might as well admit that 'renowned author' might be stretching the truth a little: his books degenerated into self-published poetry which Ada couldn't understand. Still, Ada had felt entitled and this was why her godmother's offer had come at such a brilliant time.

Delilah Grant, her father's last-remaining friend as well as her godmother, offered her the chance of going to Italy on a two-month trip to study art history. Delilah would fund most of the trip but Ada would have to come up with some of the funds herself. It felt like such a turn-around. Her mother had sold the family home, Garreg Las, in Wales, after her father's death and bought a three-bed Edwardian terrace house in Brockley. It didn't have the same cachet as the early-Regency mansion. Now she had the opportunity to mix with the sort of people she should be mixing with.

It's a little unfortunate that when she arrives in Venice she joins a group where there are established friendships and relationships. She's always going to be the odd one out, or, rather, one of the two odd ones out. Mallory Kaplan is American and she's not completely attuned to how the British upper classes operate. She doesn't understand the stiff upper lip and it's not long before she's seen as a bit of a nuisance. Still, they're all dilettanti now and the brochure had promised that they'd be making friends and connections for life. Ada doesn't actually lie about her past, but she relies heavily on the nostalgia of Garreg Las, the pain of its loss and how much her father meant to her. She just has to ensure that she's needed, welcomed in, by this group.

Petra Deane was a child actor and has the confidence to go with it. She's in an on-off relationship with Lorcan Holt, who's the half-sister of Anabelle Gilani (who seems to be the only person, apart from Ada, who's on a budget). She's also in a relationship with ones of the 'cicerones', Dr Nathan Harper, whose wife, Clemency, hasn't accompanied the group. Lorcan is a school friend of Willa Murray and he's also the cousin of Nate Harper. And that's just a selection of the dilettanti on the tour.

Complicated, isn't it? Author Laura Vaughan does a brilliant job of bringing the individual characters out of what could have been an amorphous mass. Apart from Ada, they're all privileged, assured of their place in the world. How is Ada going to fit in? Well, she does a favour...

The 'tour' begins in Venice, moves to Florence and then to Rome and on the way we're given judicious looks at the art and architecture - just enough to what your appetite but not so much that the story is overwhelmed. It's more than forty years since I did the same trip (with a very-much-reduced time scale, I hasten to add) and it brought back some good memories.

The plot is exceptional: I finished the book in less than twenty-four hours because I simply had to find out what happened and the denouement had me gasping - I really didn't see it coming. I'm looking forward to seeing what Vaughan writes next and I'd like to thank the publishers for making a copy available to the Bookbag.