I am sorry for the inconvenience but I don’t have the time to read this anymore and have lost interest in the concept. I believe that it would benefit your book more if I did not skim your book and write a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.

When I started reading this novel I thought for a moment I had discovered a long lost manuscript by the great E.M. Forster, but Paul Yates soon asserted his literary rights with his own touch of class. The writing is elegant, beautiful, and full of perceptive moments of genius as the author explores the human condition in all its many forms and variations. The story was intriguing and engaging, and both women, separated by the passing of half a century, touched my heart, when they finally stepped forth out of the shadows to fulfill their destinies.

Emily and Daisy

Too much unnecessary detail and saying what happens instead of showing with context clues. Jumping around a lot from one scene to the next in a single chapter, leading to confusion on what’s happening and feeling like I missed something.
WITHOUT WARNING or any indication signs (again telling exactly what happens instead of giving context clues) there was a GRAPHIC SA scene in the first 20 pages 🙃 This incident is how Daisy meets her love interest, James (seriously when will we stop using violence against women to propel a story forwards).


Trigger: sexual assault, child abuse

Emily and Daisy is a story about searching and finding. It’s not a mystery per se, but still is as the character of Emily tries to figure out who Daisy was to her recently passed relative. It revolves partly around a portrait that Daisy sat for in her youth that Emily’s dad just inherited.

We follow both women in two different timelines, with Daisy being in the 1940s and Emily in present day and how the actions of Daisy back then concerns Emily in the present.

I enjoyed this story, the language flowed well, and I was interested in what the characters were up continuously. It’s sort of both a slow and fast book at the same time which I found very interesting whilst reading. What I mean by that is that the book was fairly short but still managed to keep the pace down.