Life After Coffee - Virginia Franken (GIVEAWAY!)

5 Stars!

ABOUT THE BOOK -

When globe-trotting coffee buyer, Amy O’Hara, assures her husband—who stays at home to watch the kids—that it is He Who Has it Harder… she doesn’t really believe it. That is, until the day she gets laid off, her husband decides to devote all his waking hours to writing a screenplay, and she discovers she’s actually the world’s most incompetent mother.

Amy’s only possible salvation is to find another high-flying job as quickly as possible, but with the coffee industry imploding around her—and the competing buyers in her field being much hipper prospects—things look pretty dire. Even if Amy does manage to find full-time employment ever again, as her life slowly becomes more and more entwined with her children’s, how will she be able to bear leaving them to travel for weeks on end?

When salvation appears in the form of a movie-mogul ex-boyfriend who wants to employ her husband and rekindle their relationship, Amy starts to find she’s sorely tempted…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR -

Virginia Franken was born and raised in the United Kingdom. She graduated from the University of Roehampton, in London, with a degree in dance and worked on cruise liners as a professional dancer before changing tracks to pursue a career in publishing. Franken currently lives in suburban Los Angeles with two kids, a dog, an overweight goldfish, and one bearded dude, in a house that’s just a little too small to fit everyone in comfortably. She gets most of her writing done when she should be sleeping. This is her first novel.

Connect with Virginia

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MY THOUGHTS -
OOOOHHHH, I loved this one!!! To say this is my type of book is a huge understatement! Boy I miss these kinds of books - Thank you Virginia! And to think this is her first novel - I'm a fan.
A fun, crazy, intense book that will keep you eagerly reading from cover to cover!

I am a coffee freak, I am a coffee book freak. I will literally read any book with coffee on the cover or coffee in the title. I know, I'm sorry, it's a little crazy/over-the-top but it is what it is.

"Everyone in Bean à la Bean is dressed in a cutting-edge Silver Lake uniform of porkpie hat and skinny jeans, with big old holes in the earlobes. None of them have any real heartfelt knowledge of what actually had to happen in order for them to have their trendsetting beverage experience. When did all this hoopla come about? Can’t it just be about the coffee anymore?"

I loved all the talk about coffee and the traveling to buy just the perfect coffee beans - I get it! My husband and I will go out and spend $10.00 on two cups of coffee and then complain about the price of gas or bottled water! Priorities.

Excellent character development! I loved Amy. She may be one of my most favorite characters ever! My favorite characters to read about are the ones with all the sarcasm and snark and she had that covered. But she was also smart, independent, strong, gritty and just so real. I hate to say it but she reminds me of me. I am a very sarcastic/snarky/ gritty person by nature - I guess its the NY in me. If she lived in my now PA city I am sure we would be friends.
I also liked her husband, as odd as he was.

 How could Peter just walk out the door like that? Is that the new ruling? Whoever gets their shoes on last is lumbered with the childcare crisis? Is that a male thing or a Peter thing? I would never pull a stunt like that. And is that an Amy thing or am I just hardwired to please? Gender equality, my b-hole. It’s all good and fine until some dude pulls the a~hole move. It’s times like this when I wish, dream, that we had family living closer. Even some e-smoking, alcoholic great-aunt who force-fed the children Cheetos—any viable humanoid to help us out in situations like these.

And there it is. Sitter number four. And she can’t make it either. I feel my face go ice-cold with panic. What am I going to do? Am I really going to miss this job interview? Is that really going to happen? I am about to Google “Is it okay to leave five-year-old looking after three-year-old?” when I remember a fragment of a news story I recently heard about the government logging everyone’s web searches. They’ll have social services round before I’m halfway down the street.

And I loved the kids! Violet and Billy - they were probably two of the most real kids in an adult book I have read. I don't know why authors always get the kids wrong, but Virginia got it so right! As I was reading about the kids' antics I was thinking to myself  "yep, been there, done that".

“Mommy, what’s an address book?” Billy asks. “It’s a book that people used to write phone numbers and addresses in. Before we had iPhones,” I tell him. “You mean like in the olden days?” asks Violet.

“And then yesterday she made me eat cabbage sandwiches for dinner.” “Cabbage sandwiches?” Peter looks alarmed. “They were kale-and-lemon panini.” See, I’m trying to make healthful meals for my family. Plus, I’d never tried out the panini maker I got from Peter’s mother two years ago. Granted, they turned out kind of awful. “You can’t feed a five-year-old a kale sandwich, Amy.” I’m about to tell him that I’m sure somewhere in this vast world, there is at least one five-year-old child who has, at some point in history, consumed a kale-and-lemon panini...

Which now brings me to the ending... can the ending stand up to the rest of the book? YES! It does - score! Loved the ending. So there you have it - the perfect book.

Thank you TLC book tours for sending me this GREAT book for my honest review!

Order your copy from Amazon - HERE


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