📚Book Review📚

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I'd like to thank NetGalley and Doubleday for approving me for an ARC of this book. This was a #TsundokuSquad read and, it's safe to say it was a winner!

😢Emotional
💞Love
🥰Friendship
🤞🏻Hopeful

Eddie Winston has well and truly stolen my heart. He is a character that you not only love but you root for. His beautiful friendship with Bella, who I adored as well, was wonderfully special. Marianne Cronin has delivered another story filled with relatable and loveable characters. Grab the tissues for this one!

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A 90plus man looking for love, not what you expect. Enjoy observing Eddie's life as he goes about his daily life. Working in a charity shop, his colleague, shoppers and friends. Whilst looking back at his life.
Will he find his ever after?
I really enjoyed this book and it made me smile.

The story of Eddie a 90 year old gentleman who has lived and loved but never been kissed. Eddie spends his days volunteering at a charity shop, I loved this element of the book. Wondering what stories each donation has to tell and where they have come from, also the sad reality is that a lot of donations come from people that have passed away. A very sad but beautiful written book with some unexpected friendships it was really uplifting to read.

It’s never too late, your time will come. Eddie is 90 and never been kissed. Bella has lost her soul mate very young. Their friendship brings fun and tears and gentle care into their lives to give room to heal and search. A lovely, thoughtful, delicious read to savour.

Having loved Marianne Cronin's first book, 'One hundred Years of Lenni and Margot', I couldn't wait to read 'Eddie Winston is Looking for Love'. I couldn't put this joy of a book down. What a delight! It's a beautifully written book revolving around friendship, hope and love. Both Eddie and Bella's story's had me spellbound. I laughed, cried, smiled and ugly cried my way through it. Thank you so much Netgalley, the author and publisher for sharing an early read of this heartwarming book. Highly recommend.

I have reviewed Eddie Winston is Looking for Love by Marianne Cronin for book sales and recommendation site LoveReading..co.uk. I have chosen the title as a LoveReading Star Book and a Liz Pick of the Month. Please see the link for the full review.

Eddie Winston, 90,  is a lovely, gentle & good- hearted chap, and quite rightly, this means he has drawn to him a rock steady circle of friends. But he has spent his life waiting for love, following the love of his early life being kept from him by infuriating (to my mind) circumstance. In the course of working in a charity shop, sorting through the donated treasure & detritus brought in, he meets Bella, 24,  grieving, dissatisfied & in need of a buddy, and so a heart-warming and life-long friendship begins.

This is an enjoyable read, a little disjointed at times and rather predictable, but a good one to go to if you want a to be reminded there are good people, and hard times can get better.  Making the acquaintance of Eddie has been really rather lovely.

I requested this ARC, having really enjoyed Marianne Cronins first novel 'The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot'. Thank you to Netgalley, Marianne Cronin & publisher for the opportunity to read more of the authors' work in exchange for an honest review. Set for publication 15th August 2024.

Shut Up! How cute does this book sound?!

I'm not sure there's a single person who read Marianne's previous book - The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot - and didn't absolutely love it. I know I definitely did. And I've been waiting for a new book since then, and I couldn't be more thrilled about this.

This may only be the second of Marianne's books, but she has this expertise at writing elderly characters as full characters, not just as a side note or comic character or to tick a box. They are right there, front and centre, and they're marvellous.

Eddie Winston himself is an absolute darling and I fell in love with him instantly. We get to know present-day 90-year-old Eddie, as well as the Eddie of the 1960s, and I can completely believe that are the same person. He had this granddad energy around him, but also felt very much like a friend and confidante, and I would love to meet him. He's the main character of the book (obviously), but he does have a few other characters that orbit around him, who are just as marvellous, but don't take any sparkle away from him.

I love how Marianne has formatted this story. Instead of just having chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, and so on throughout Eddie's story, we see it through people and items donated to the charity shop, so for example, a chapter might start "The Girl With the Pink Hair", and that scene will focus on...you guessed it...a girl with pink hair, and how her part in the story affects Eddie. And I think that really helps bring everything else into Eddie's story and, I just felt it was a uniquely lovely way of reading it.

It does have some tricky subjects such as ageing, loneliness, isolation, loss, grief, bereavement, loss love, marital issues, affairs, etc. They're not so heavy to weigh the story down, but they do have enough gravitas to be important to the overall story, and they're all topics that we can recognise and relate to.

It's a very moving book. I don't mean that necessarily in a really sad way as such, it's more about the heart Marianne has managed to weave into it. This sense of love and friendship, both happiness and sadness, it really gets to you.

It's a perfectly pitched novel. It's not over-the-top sappy or sad or upbeat. It's got it's high moments and it's low moments. It's got pain and heartbreak and sorrow and longing and loneliness. But it's also filled with love and friendship and second chances and memory and joy, and above all, hope.

It was as splendid as I hoped it would be. It's so heartwarming and cosy, funny and loving, beautiful and uplifting. Just a really, really jolly read, and I loved it. Marianne Cronin is definitely an author that I will look out for, for many years to come. She is a very special storyteller and character creator.

I recommended Lenni and Margot to everyone who asked - and some who didn't - and you can bet I'll be doing the same with this. It is simply spectacular. I am in love with Eddie Winston and I am in love with Marianne Cronin and all that she creates.

I loved ‘The One Hundred Years of Leni and Margot ‘so when I was offered this book, I was really looking forward to reading it. The copy I read would have benefited from some further editing, hence the 4 stars not 5, but the intrinsic story is wonderful.

Eddie is 90 and after a career in academia he is now volunteering in a charity shop. There he meets Bella who at 24 has lost the love of her life and is grieving. When Bella brings some of Jake’s belongings to the charity shop and unlikely friendship grows and blossoms and they are both soon involved in healing each other’s lives. Bella to get over Jake and start grieving properly and living again – and Eddie who has searched for love his whole life after his heart was broken as a young man by Bridie Bennet, and who has never been kissed.

Eddie Winston is a warm hug in a book, and you won’t want to stop during the final quarter as you will be heavily invested in Eddie and Bella’s stories.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6649391698

https://maddybooksblog.blogspot.com/2024/07/eddie-winston-is-looking-for-love-by.html

Oh Goodness. I absolutely loved 100 Years of Lenni and Margot so am so happy that this is the most beautiful book - I had worried a bit about how Cronin could follow up such a lovely read, but I think this is even better.
Eddie Winston is a 94 year old man who works in a charity shop. He saves items which clearly hold sentimental value and tries to reunite them with the people to whom they have meaning. When Eddie meets Bella, grieving the loss of her boyfriend in her early 20s, the pair strike up a lovely friendship in which they help each other. It turns out that Eddie has never been kissed and Bella decides to help him find love, but Eddie is holding onto the memory of a previous love, for Birdie, never consummated, which might be holding him back.
This is a a warm, emotionally attuned book where I really wanted Eddie and Bella and their friends to be my friend too. I loved how, in his 90s, Eddie develops his sense of style in some unexpected ways, and how his friendship with Bella is restorative for her, helping her to grieve and move on.
Absolutely wonderful.

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

90 year old Eddie Winston has never been kissed, but he’s an incurable romantic, ever the optimist, and a true gentleman to boot!

Former university lecturer, Eddie, loves carrying out his voluntary work in a charity shop in Birmingham, UK, sifting through the remnants of others lives, and it’s here that he meets Bella, a young woman who has recently lost her boyfriend who was the love of her life. Though there is a huge gap in their ages, this meeting will transform into a most beautiful platonic friendship that will change both their lives for the better.

What can I say about this beautifully written book that hasn’t already been said? Well honestly I can’t. It’s warm and funny, moving and optimistic. As characters go you just can’t improve on Eddie, he’s a truly wonderful human being, and we would all benefit from an Eddie in our lives. A lovely story.

Completely delightful. I loved Eddie and Bella so very much and was so pleased he found B in the end.

4* Eddie Winston is Looking for Love by Marianne Cronin is warm, uplifting, quirky and a hoot. If you loved Margot and Lenni, you’ll enjoy this one just as much, if not more or more (and if you haven’t read One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot - get to it!).

Eddie is a good egg. At 90 he works in a Birmingham charity shop, where he rescues items of sentimental value which people might return for. When Bella comes into the shop to donate items from her boyfriend, an unlikely bond is formed between the two of them. And when Bella finds out that Eddie is still awaiting his first kiss, she sets Eddie a challenge…

Told across two timelines; modern day Eddie and Bella and 1960s Eddie and his first (and only) love, this is a laugh out loud, gut-wrenching and ultimately uplifting book. The characters are fabulous, the small details zing from the page and the last 3rd must be read on one go for required peace of mind. It’s a stunner. Thoroughly recommended.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

Eddie is a sprightly ninety years old and volunteers in a charity shop. Following an unusual donation, he befriends a grieving Bella. Admitting to Bella he's never been kissed, she sets out to find Eddie someone to love.

Eddie Winston Is Looking For Love is the second novel by author Marianne Cronin. This author is new to me but I was immediately drawn to this book by the quirky title and cover. Add in the fact that it is described as "funny, feelgood, heart-lifting" and I was sold. Having finished the book I now want to hunt down the author so I can lock her away and force her to do nothing but write so that she has a huge catalogue of books to devour.

Eddie, a retired academic, volunteers at a small charity shop to pass the time. Along with the manager, Marjie, Eddie spends a lot of his time examining the items that are donated. Every so often Eddie comes across an item that can't be sold, items that are too personal such as photographs and letters. Not wanting to consign them to the rubbish, Eddie takes them home, becoming the caretaker for people's memories.

It is one such donation that sparks an unlikely friendship. Twenty-four-year-old Bella is grieving the loss of her boyfriend when she donates some of his goods to the charity shop. Eddie knows that the notebook and photographs are too personal to sell and the well-worn Converse trainers are special, so he decides to look after them in the hope that Bella will eventually want them back.

An unlikely friendship is formed between Eddie and Bella and they regularly share lunch in Pigeon Park. Gradually, we discover that Bella is struggling to move on with her life and that Eddie has never been kissed. Having fallen in love with a married woman as a student he was too honorable to do anything about it and still thinks about her. This is just the knowledge that Bella needs to give her life some impetus, she sets out on a mission to find love for Eddie.

Eddie is such a wonderful character, one of life's optimists, a genuinely nice person. Unrequited love hasn't left him bitter, it's left him sentimental. Ever hopeful, Eddie relishes the opportunities online dating brings. Refusing to conform, and why should he at the age of ninety, Eddie is always on the lookout for new ideas (and I'm on the lookout for an emerald-green silk shirt, printed with cheetahs, prowling, paws outstretched up and down the sleeves and the chest - cheetahs, not leopards, because cheetahs are slinkier). Despite knock-backs, Eddie doesn't give up and some new and exciting friendships are formed.

I laughed and I cried, I really didn't expect to have my heart broken (more than once) in this wonderful tale of optimism, generosity of spirit and second chances.

Sheer, sheer joy. Every page screams cute. I smiled throughout.

Do pre-order, do read.

Full review to come on my blog!

A delightful engaging read featuring a cast of wonderful characters.
An unlikely pairing of sprightly 90 year old Eddie Winston and 25 year old Bella as they embark on a friendship and Bella assists Eddie in his quest to have his first ever kiss.
A sweet but not sickly read proving that it's never too late to find love and that despite generation gaps you can find lasting friendships.
I'm grateful to Netgalley and Random House UK for the opportunity to read this advanced copy with no obligation to leave my review

This is a sweet cosy read.

Eddie and Bella are best friends - Eddie is 90, Bella is 24. One of them's never been kissed, one of them has recently lost their partner, together they're an adorable team who help each other through life's troubles and back on to better things.

Recommended for those moments when you just want something easy and comforting to dip into.

I read Lenni and Margot a few years ago now and it genuinely brought tears for my eyes, so I was excited for Marianne Cronin's latest offering, and I was not disappointed.
I absolutely adored Eddie and Bella, and watching their beautiful friendship develop. I love reading of age gap friendships, and this one was done so well - both helping each other in their own ways.
There was a whole host of other lovable characters, all adding something unique.
I was so invested in this story, from Eddie's quest for his first kiss, to learning what had become of his previous Birdie.
Overall just a beautiful, heartwarming story - with the perfect amount of pigeons!

An absolutely wonderful story of Eddie, who is 90 years old, and never been kissed. He befriends a young woman who is grieving for her lost love and between them, they help each other. Well written characters and lovely plot, including the lovely little side story of finding love for his guinea pig! Was sad to finish it.

I absolutely loved this gentle book about 90 year old Eddie. A fabulous tale of friendship between retired academic Eddie and Bella, a 24 year old supermarket worker. Slightly quirky but somehow totally believable with Marianne's wonderfully drawn very likeable characters. Set in Birmingham in the present day with some background flashbacks. Engagingly low key and beautifully written with a touch of humour. An excellent second novel after One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot