I am very happy to be welcoming Liz Taylorson to Novel Kicks. She’s here with the blog tour for her novel, Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm.

A simple holiday just got complicated …

Single mum Amy has been struggling since her mother’s death and now her son, Harry, has been accused of bullying schoolmate Oliver — giving Amy’s dictatorial ex-husband yet another reason to criticise her parenting.

All Amy wants is the chance to spend time with her son. Where better to escape all her troubles than camping at the remote but beautiful Lake District farm where she spent idyllic summers with her mother when she was a little girl?

Her tranquil escape seems doomed when Oliver, and his widowed dad, Matt, turn up on the neighbouring pitch — but at Elder Fell Farm, unlikely friendships can be forged. Are Matt and Amy ready to fall in love again? And will their boys bring them together – or drive them apart?

*****

To celebrate the release of Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm, Harry, the heroine’s son, having been asked to write a book review for school, has written about this novel. Over to you, Harry.

My Book Review of ‘Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm’

By Harry Brand, aged 8 and 2 months.

I chose this book to write about because Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm is all about me and my best friend, Oliver and what happened when we went on our summer holidays. Okay, it’s a bit about my mam, Amy, and Ollie’s dad, Matt, because they were there too, but all they did was, like, snogging and stuff which is gross, so mainly I’m going to write about the other things in the book.

My favourite character in the book is Harry, aka me! He does lots of cool stuff in the book, he finds a den and plays in the beck quite a lot with his best friend Oliver, but he isn’t allowed to go skinny dipping, which is the same thing as swimming in the nuddy, which means with NO CLOTHES ON. But Mam wouldn’t let me … I mean, him. The boys also make up an awesome game called ‘bonky, bonky’ and an air bed got burst, but it definitely wasn’t Harry that burst it, honestly.

Also in the book is Harry’s dad, James. James gives Harry cool trainers and promises to take him to Florida. Amy gets cross and says James should let Harry express himself more, but James says Harry should “spend less time expressing himself, and more time learning to control himself.” Amy and James don’t really like each other very much any more, though they used to be married.

The scene I liked best in Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm is the one where Amy tries to pitch the tent. She isn’t really very good at camping – Dad says she didn’t know one end of a tent pole from another, and if it wasn’t for Matt we might have had to sleep in my den with the sheep poo. When the tent fell down she said ‘bollicks’ and I heard her. Matt was in the campervan next door and he helped her pitch the tent, and I think that’s why they started being friends.

The bit I didn’t like was the bit where Matt and Amy made the boys go for a LONG WALK to a stupid valley. They built a dam and saw some deers. Amy and Matt looked at each other strange, and she said it was magical, but it wasn’t, it was bollicks and very, very boring.

I thought it was sad in the book that Harry’s Granny Jen had died. She would have liked to come back to Elder Fell Farm, because that’s where she used to take Amy on holiday when Amy was a little girl. Granny Jen used to do things like making paper boats and reading the Titty book. We read the Titty book too, but Mam didn’t like it when I laughed cos the girl was called Titty. She kept trying to make me call it by its proper name, which is Swallows and Amazons and that’s a really great book because there isn’t any kissing – just camping and pirates and having battles.

To sum up, I like the bits with ghost stories and the camp fire, but I’d give this story 3 out of 5 because the author really spoiled it with the kissing and all that bollicks. The Titty book is way better.

About Liz Taylorson: 

Liz has always surrounded herself with books.

As a child, she was always to be found with her head in one and she still has a bookcase full of her childhood favourites to this day. She went on to work in a library cataloguing early printed books – but as most of the books turned out to be volumes of sermons, she wasn’t tempted to read them all!

Children interrupted her bibliographic career, and Liz started writing fiction and hasn’t stopped since, joining the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers’ Scheme in 2015 to try to learn how to write novels properly.  This led to publication of her first romantic novel, The Little Church by the Sea in late 2017, followed by The Manor on the Moorsin 2019.

When Covid struck, Liz was working on a novel set in the 1990s, but sadly research proved difficult when she could no longer access the microfilm readers at the reference library. Instead, she wrote Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm which relied largely on her own experiences of campervans, campsites and noisy children.

Say hello to Liz via her website, Twitter and Facebook. 

Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm was released n August 2022. Click to buy on Amazon UK and Amazon US. 

by

Laura

I’m Laura. I started Novel Kicks in 2009. I wanted a place to post my writing as well as give other writers like me the opportunity to do the same. There is also a monthly book club, a writing room which features writing prompts, book reviews, competitions, author interviews and guest posts.

I grew up by the sea (my favourite place in the world) and I currently live in Hampshire. I am married to Chris, have a cat named Buddy and I would love to be a writer. I’m trying to write the novel I’ve talked so much about writing if only I could stop pressing delete. I’ve loved writing since creative writing classes in primary school. I have always wanted to see my teacher Miss Sayers again and thank her for the encouragement. When not trying to write the novel or writing snippets of stories on anything I can get my hands on, I love reading, dancing like a loon and singing to myself very badly. My current obsession is Once Upon a Time and I would be happy to live with magic in the enchanted forest surrounded by all those wonderful stories provided that world also included Harry Potter. I love reading chick lit. contemporary fiction and novels with mystery.