This book is a tear-jerker. I try not to read books like this, especially if I know there are going to be scenes that will have me grabbing for tissues. Lucy's story is every reader's story who has known the type of pain and loss from missed opportunities, miscarriage, etc. A good read.

This is my first book by Amanda Prowse and I don't know why I haven't discovered her before now. I need to spend some time exploring her earlier books

Lucy has a successful career and as she approaches 40, she realizes that she wants a family. She meets Jonah at a christening and they get married soon after but starting a family proves to be very difficult. As she struggles with her infertility, Joanh's teenage daughter, Camille, comes to stay with them for the summer which adds additional stress to Lucy's already stressful life. This book asks the question of what it takes to create a family even if it isn't the one that you envisioned.

I really enjoyed this book, especially the three main characters. I thought that the author did a fantastic job of creating real characters with all of their flaws who ultimately loved each other.

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

The story of Lucy who is happily married a little later in life and has suffered some painful losses with miscarriages. Then enters her teenage step-daughter who is a handful. The story reads like a real life story with personal struggles as well as personal triumphs. A feel good story that I enjoyed. Thank you Netgalley for an advanced reader copy. This is the first book I've read from this author but likely not the last. A very clean book with believable characters.

The Idea Of You by Amanda Prowse is a well-written, heart-wrenching, piece of fiction that is somewhat close to hitting home on a personal level for me in the sense that being a married woman, I'm expected to pop out children. In the seven years that I've been married to my amazing husband, it hasn't happened and the pressure is still there to the point where I've started avoiding physically attending baby showers (that and because I'm a shy, introvert). I'm on the fence about having children of my own because I honestly feel that I'm selfish and self-centered (to a degree) where I'll be classified as a horrible mother if I ever have children (I already have such a high standard of expectation for my future child's behavior, character, creativity and intellect that it would be impossible and super stressful for said future child to meet). I'm awkward around humans especially kids and I prefer the company of dogs, books and older people. I'd rather not have kids and just be the greatest aunt in the world to my nephews but my husband still hopes for at least one child (or triplets).

With that said, every month that goes by, I can relate to what Lucy goes through: the disappointment, heart-break, pain and depression that follows every one of her miscarriage. Because of this book, I now know what it feels like to have that home test kit show that you're pregnant only to find out that the baby you've been hoping for does not have a heartbeat and you end up with another miscarriage. I haven't been there and I hope to never know such pain especially the pain that would cause my husband. I would not wish such pain on anyone.

Lucy's tumultuous journey to motherhood and accepting her reality is not exactly a happy one but inspiring nonetheless in the sense that women who can't have children can still have that sense of fulfillment in other ways: by loving the children around you as if they were your own (or you can always adopt a baby). It is definitely a hard lesson to learn and even harder to apply in real life especially when I see how much my husband enjoys being around our little nephew.

In conclusion, The Idea Of You by Amanda Prowse did have a big twist, which I did enjoy but this book is not for everyone especially for those who like highly satisfyingly good endings. This has a sad but good ending. All the supporting characters are well developed, the plot is a bit slow and sometimes I feel like the tension in the story was added on just for the sake of having a bit of drama. The way the end of the chapters was laid out with a sort of journal entry-ish style was a bit confusing but it does clear up in the end, so that part was okay. Overall, it was a good book and definitely geared towards women (and their loving partners) who are struggling with the pain of miscarriage(s) or their inability to have children of their own.

Thank you NetGalley and Lake union publishing for the chance to read this book in exchange of my honest review.
Lucy is 39 and seems to have achieved a lot. The one thing she is aching for that seems link an impossible dream is a baby. She has gone through the heartbreak of miscarriages.
She does not have a good relationship with her step daughter.
This is a book to read when you want to shut out the rest of the world, curl up on the sofa in your comfortable PJ’s, a box of chocolates and big box of tissues.
A real girly read.

Whilst this wouldn't normally be my first choice of reading material, not being interested in children or the stereotypical view of domestic bliss, there is much to gain from this book. Poignant, dramatic and insightful, The Idea of You follows Lucy on her journey to become a mother, a feat that might well be harder than it seems.

Amanda Prowse is a master of the domestic setting, of writing about ordinary people and the struggles that decimate their lives whilst the rest of the world is oblivious. Here is a story all too familiar to many - the burning desire to have a child, and the cruel twists of fate that stop that from happening. We feel Lucy's pain and distress, we sympathise with her feelings of failure and we grieve her losses too. As her life becomes upended, we try to analyse the mistakes and misgivings, all the while finding ourselves privy to a slowly-unfolding revelation. And it is one that shatters everything.

The Idea of You is an important insight into the trials women face to conceive and to carry a baby to full term, of the knockbacks and lack of answers from medical professionals, of the terrible and gruelling ordeal of losing a life not yet brought fully into the world and of trying to deal with the fallout of that. It is a story of grief and loss, of wrong turns and words unsaid, and ultimately of redemption and acceptance.

At times, the language feels clunky and the descriptions unnecessary or like filler. However, this is a pacy read with a clever use of first-person narrative at the end of each third-person chapter, through which a twist is subtly revealed. As an overarching theme, there is an implication that all women adore babies and aspire to be a mother, which won't sit easily with every reader; nonetheless, this is a book with a worthwhile message, and it is one that is worth reading.

For what this story ended up being, it was good. Lucy and Jonah want a baby, but they're both, well, older. Lucy and Jonah have kind of a whirlwind romance and are married soon after the meet. Lucy is recovering from a breakup and Jonah has been divorced, so this is it for them.

When Lucy gets pregnant they are beyond excited...until she miscarries early on in the pregnancy. The majority of the first half of the book is Lucy and Jonah dealing with this loss and not telling anyone close to them about the pregnancy or the loss of it.

In the midst of this, Jonah's teenage daughter comes to live with them and causes a lot of different types of emotions. She's a teenager, obviously, and she and Lucy are at odds most of the time. Lucy is pretty much on a constant rollercoaster of emotions throughout the entire story, from being pregnant and miscarrying not once, but three (three!) times.

I did like this story for what it was: a story about loss and accepting the life you've been given. The characters are good and most of them make a lot of growth throughout the book. Camille's change was, by far, my favorite.

We do learn a lot about Lucy by the end of the book. Some of the chapters are letters that she's written, but you don't find out who the letters are to (unless you infer) until the end.

The ending was a little too tidy for me, as far as some of the characters showing up. (Camille's mother, for example. Ugh.)

Ultimately this was a good story. A little too much drama for me, but I do enjoy character growth and a happy ending.

I give this 3 1/2 stars. The only reason I don't give this 4 stars is because I didn't care for the main subject matter. The writing is good and I did like all the characters in the book and that is why I continued reading this book to the end. My own personal feeling on the baby subject matter is what drew me away from the book. I don't care to have children and I really couldn't connect to Lucy wanting children as much as she did. I will say the writing was good to the point that I did want to know what was going to happen to Lucy and the family. I still enjoyed this book even with my own personal feelings.

A lovely poignant story. There were some sad, thought provoking parts but I felt it was true to life of many. Nice ending which showed sometimes you don't realise what you need to make you content.

Beautiful story giving great insight into the feelings of love, loss, despair, sadness and happiness.

I can see at a glance that a bunch of other people really enjoyed this, but I didn't. It felt as though it needed a thorough redrafting; the dialogue, for example, sounded stilted to my ear, mostly due to the lack of contractions in every character's speech but also because they just didn't sound like real people, and the plot was one-note. The side characters felt more developed than the main protagonists (for example, Lucy loves her job and is very successful, but she hardly spends any time at it and when she is there, all she does is talk about/avoid talking about the one plot point). Slice of life is fine but the lives have to be interesting, and these just weren't.

An emotional read that shows us one woman’s struggles to have a baby in an otherwise “perfect” life.

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In The Idea of You, Lucy Carpenter appears to have it all. Nearing forty, she’s now happily married to a wonderful man, Jonah, she has a successful career, and the chance to complete her small family with a baby.
But Lucy and Jonah soon find that having a baby isn’t quite as easy as they thought, and the struggles end up wearing on the two, straining their marriage.
Then, when Jonah’s ex-wife in France contacts him because she’s having a difficult time with their daughter Camille, Lucy and Jonah agree to invite Camille to live with them for the summer in England.
Ideas of bonding with her new step-daughter evaporates as soon as Lucy meets the prickly teen; and she’s then having to contend with the added fissures it brings to her already struggling relationship with Jonah.
And now, it appears that Lucy’s “perfect” life may not be all that perfect after all.
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I wasn’t all that interested in this book initially; it seemed too…boring, to be honest. We get to see how Lucy met Jonah, then the early months of their marriage. We also see the couple struggle to have a baby. So I know this book is a contemporary, hence the modern, real life struggles, but I personally was not really interested in reading fiction about everyday life.
At least not at the moment.
But in my quest to finish more NetGalley reads, I continued on and ended up liking it more than I thought I would.

Lucy, I think, is meant to be a complex character, showing all of the emotions a woman may go through when trying to have a baby. We see her happy, hopeful, and then finally, sad. I’ve never had any children myself, so I can’t claim any sort of knowledge when it comes to having them, though I have heard that pregnancy can be harder the older you get, so I’m not very surprised that Lucy is struggling at age 40. Obviously women older than her do get pregnant, but I’m not going to over-analyze the reason a fictional character can’t seem to get pregnant. Also, what about IVF? Just an idea if one is so desperate to have a baby, and it does appear that she has the money to pay for it…

I should move on before I continue to sound even more insensitive…

I loved Jonah, because he was just so understanding and sweet and caring towards Lucy! She literally found the perfect husband!
Okay, so the the perfect man did come with baggage in the form of a teenage daughter, but he’s so good that I almost can forgive him.
Almost.
Unfortunately for Lucy, Camille makes for the stereo-typical step-daughter from hell.
Lucy does try to welcome Camille, but Camille is not having it. I’d understand it a bit more if she was acting out because she was afraid her father was being taken away from her, but having spent most of her life living in France with her mother and step-father (who she also calls ‘dad’), even Jonah admits they weren’t very close. So I can’t quite understand where all her hostility is coming from. I won’t address this subject further for fear of spoilers, and not wanting to give anything pertinent away.

There’s definitely the sense that a lot of drama could be avoided if people just talked about their problems, but that would be too easy, and this book would be boring otherwise.

Big reveals abound in the last quarter of the book, and this is when I started to genuinely feel emotional reading it. There were some tears, and if a book can move me to cry, then I think it has done its job.

So, though initially slow-moving, I do feel this book did get better, so I will recommend this if you’re interested in a book that will likely have you ranging in emotions.

The main idea underlying The Idea of You by Amanda Prowse is the definition of "you" – a child lost. The book begins with a focus on the grief of miscarriage but then introduces a second story line. The second overshadows what initially draws me into the book. I wish the book had explored more its initial theme of miscarriage and its impact on not just the woman but the family who experiences it.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2017/04/the-idea-of-you.html

Reviewed for NetGalley

Becoming a mum is a wonderful thing. But trying to become one sometimes can be an incredibly painful journey. If you're a woman over 30 I'm sure you've already been asked WHEN are you going to have kids. If you're over 35, you've probably already heard the wonderful 'you're not getting any younger'. Nevermind that you might not want kids, or maybe you've been trying to get pregnant without success, or have suffered a miscarriage, or are actually not able to conceive. I'm sure people have the best intentions in mind when they ask about this, but I still think that it's nobody's business but the couple if and when they have kids, because their seemingly innocent questions might be causing a lot of pain.

The Idea of You talks about the struggle of Lucy, a 'woman who has it all' (a successful career in advertising, a wonderful house and a lovely husband) to have a child. I just became a mum myself three months ago, so I approached this book with a mixture of excitement and dread.

Spoilers ahead!

The book begins with Lucy meeting her husband Jonah at the age of 39 - their meeting was super cute and Jonah seemed destined to join my bbf shelf straight away. Then we jump a year ahead, when they're trying to have a child. Lucy is truly desperate to become a mother, and reading about her suffering miscarriage after miscarriage was heartbreaking. However, I was not as moved as I thought I would be , and I think this was due to the language used in the book - the writing is good, but to me it felt very careful. I feel horrible saying this because I know the book was inspired by the author's own experience, but I never fully connected with Lucy's pain.

Later in the book Jonah's teenage daughter from a previous marriage comes to live with them, and this adds more strain to his relationship with Lucy. Jonah had been the perfect husband so far, so wonderful and supportive through their tragedy, but the moment Camille shows up it's like he doesn't care about becoming a parent with Lucy anymore. Sure, he says he just cannot go through so much pain time and time again, but it felt like he didn't give a damn about Lucy's feelings or how horrible Camille was to her. This part was actually very interesting and I was cheering Lucy every time she stood up for herself, which thankfully she did, but then things change again and the book turned into some kind of soap opera.

Lucy finds out that Camille is pregnant at the same time that she is suffering her third miscarriage, but she decides that her own feelings are not important and focuses on supporting the girl. Turns out that Camille's relationship with her own mother is kind of strained and she's been a brat all this time because she felt that Lucy was robbing her of her father, but actually she likes Lucy very much. This makes perfect sense, but Camille's change of personality was so drastic that it was just not believable. And Lucy rushed to defend Camille because she herself had had a baby girl at 16, but her mother had forced her to give the baby up for adoption, thus destroying their relationship forever, but Camille's pregnancy gives Lucy the strength to confront her mother. On top of everything, Jonah didn't know about Lucy's secret daughter and when he finds out he goes mental and generally acts like an asshole, but by the end of the book everyone's reconciled and happy and even Jonah's alcoholic ex-wife (whom he hates) is now sober and joining the ex-hubby and his new mistress for a nice summer break :/

So the story had great potential, but it didn't live up to my expectations... to me book would have been more powerful and just plain better if it would have kept the focus on Lucy and Jonah's struggle to become parents.

When in her late thirties, her long-timed boyfriend dumps her only to marry her cousin. They have everything Lucy wants and doesn't have. Later Lucy does find the right man and gets married. Lucy and her husband are frustrated with trying to have a child of their own.her husband's teenage daughter only "rubs the salt" due to not being able to stay pregnant.

It is a well written story full of emotions from heartbreak to happiness. It is am emotionally charged book that will have you in tears and then laughing next. Read it!

There is a really poignant message in this book that I really liked. Lucy is such a relatable, compelling character and her story is heart-wrenching. She struggles with many of the same things lots of women do – a ticking biological clock, a smug ex-fiance, and a troubled teenage stepdaughter.

One thing I didn’t like about THE IDEA OF YOU is the way the dialogue is written. All the characters speak in full, proper sentences instead of ever using any contractions which is great in terms of grammar – but I just don’t feel that people talk that way? This is such a personal nitpick though – I don’t think it detracts from the story.

Apart from that I adored this story. I’ll definitely pick up one of the author’s other works after reading this.

Lucy is approaching her 40th Birthday and after meeting Jonah at a christening and being blissfully happily married for a year now, they decide to start a family. Though it is not plain sailing for Lucy - she suffers several miscarriages, but at the same time she is harbouring a secret from her new husband, a secret we get snippets of in the form of flashbacks and little diary entries. What that is you will need read on to find out.

This was quite an emotional read of loss and Lucy’s story is heart wrenching. This is my first time reading anything by Amanda Prowse and it won’t be my last, I loved her style and the rawness of her characters in this story.

Lucy is fairly recently married, and at almost 40, desperately wants to have a baby. Her husband has a teenage daughter who Lucy doesn't know, and this book follows their progress as a family as the daughter comes to stay with them for the summer.

Amanda prose has only been writing for four years and in that time has written 17 novels and 6 novellas! If this is typical of her work, then I can see how she has become popular because she is really just telling stories about people in a simple and effective way.
I thought this was a pretty good book, but I didn't really connect with the characters and got pretty annoyed at them many times, so it is a 3 star read for me, but I will seek out more of Prowse's work in the future.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve really struggled with rating this one. It’s one of those books that I have such mixed feelings about. I really enjoyed some aspects but had difficulty connecting with others. I do think it’s a nice, quick read and a fairly good book for the lover of women’s fiction. But, there were flaws that made it not such a great book for me.

This is the story of a woman who has it all … except the baby she’s desperately wanting. Getting pregnant isn’t as easy as they’d hoped and when her husband’s teen daughter comes to stay with them, it doesn’t go very smoothly since it just reminds her of what she doesn’t have herself … a child. I’ve read a lot ‘want to have a baby but can’t have one’ narratives and I think it’s difficult to do in a new and unique way. So, some of my frustration with the book had to do with it not bringing a lot of newness to this story. I had a horrible time getting pregnant so I could relate to those pieces – that felt very real and raw just as it does in ‘real’ life.

The stepdaughter pieces of the story were interesting and I was hoping they’d bring the narrative to life but I think it fell flat for me. And I think that is because the main character was just difficult to understand and relate to – Lucy is very one-dimensional to me. And I was hoping to relate to her a little if not a lot. But, I just never did. Some of the things that she did or said when dealing with her stepdaughter didn’t feel very real to me. They felt artificial and made me uncomfortable.

I did like how the author brought Lucy’s story (past and today) and her stepdaughter’s stories together by the end. I thought the growth exhibited in that relationship was really quite good and probably my favorite thing about the novel.

All in all, it was a fine book but I don’t think I’ll remember it or think back on it much. I just didn’t connect with it or the characters as I’d expected given the subject matter. If you love women’s fiction or domestic dramas, this might be a book you’d enjoy. Unfortunately, it just didn’t quite work for me.

Gut wrenching and at times very poignant. This book had me entranced from the first page. A very realistic view into the life of a woman who tries to have it all. Thoroughly enjoyed this one!