The Flavours of Love

Dorothy Koomson is an author well known for her ability to produce a novel crafted around the secrets that can bring our lives crashing down often with devastating circumstances. Her latest novel ‘The Flavours of Love' promised the same. The blurb on the book gives a strong promise of a story where a woman's husband has been murdered and her daughter confesses something about his death which coincides with letters arriving from his killer.

The book starts in a rocketing fashion when Saffron is asked to attend a meeting at her fourteen year old daughters school whereby she is told her daughter is pregnant. The book then settles unto building up the story really nicely. The reader is brought quickly up to speed with the story that Saffron's husband Joel was murdered 18 months previously and the murderer was never caught. This is all tied into the mystery of how her daughter Phoebe got pregnant and by whom.

It was one of those books that gripped instantly one minute I was 1% in and the next I'd barely caught breath and I was 25% of the way through and I just wanted to know more. It felt like there was a huge secret within that needed to be resolved and I wanted to know what it was. If only that had been true.....

I struggled a little with this book because I just could not understand why Saffron would make the choices she did regards her husband's killer. I don't want to spoil the book for others but it just didn't make sense to me how she could do that even for the sake of protecting a child which she wasn't even really needing to worry about. There was so much procrastination and too little action for me. I'd have had the whole thing done and dusted much much sooner.

I found the story of her daughters pregnancy better written and more likely to ring true in real life and this did help to redeem the book. And believe me it was very well written and nicely brought together but it was all a little frustrating for me as I wanted to shake the main character by the shoulders and tell her to stop wallowing in her own pain and start doing something.

Frustrating book.