You ever find a book with a description so good you just know you're going to love it only for reading it to feel like slogging through very deep thick mud? This is that book for me. The description is wonderful, but the book? Not so much. Dual timelines are usually a favorite of mine if done correctly. Unfortunately, this one was hard to keep track of where I was and what was going on. The whole story felt very shallow. I was hoping for so much more. I'm Rating this three stars because I feel like this could be absolutely wonderful for the right reader. Unfortunately for me, it just isn't me.

🌟🌟🌟/5

I received an advanced copy for free and am leaving this review voluntarily. Thank you to NetGalley, William Morrow, and Ruth Hogan. 💕

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my digital copy in exchange for an honest review. And honestly? I loved this one...The story takes place in two timelines, the early 1970’s and the present...and normally, that might bother me but it didn't this time. The story in the past is about Imelda who spent part of her time giving readings for guests and the present story line is about Billie and her search for information on her biological parents. There is a little romance, a little tragedy, a little humor, and a dash of mystery which made it good throughout the entire book. I liked the characters, I liked the story line, and I liked reading the different timelines and watching them eventually come together...

Wonderful historical fiction. A baby is left on the door step of a resort towns tarot card readers. Skip ahead 40 years and that baby returns to discover her heritage and her history. Wonderful characters.

Heartwarming story about a fantastic cast of characters who stayed close with one another over the years and looked out for each other, great chemistry between the lovers within the story, definitely a page turner that leaves you on the edge of your seat until the end of the book. Highly recommend to all romance lovers, fortune teller fanatics, etc.

I want to thank Netgalley and the author for gifting me the ebook. An interesting women's fiction drama novel. Good weekend read.

📖My Thoughts📖

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this one before. It was simple yet had so much to offer. It was very light all around, with a mixture of magic, romance, mystery and more, no specific theme being too overpowering. This book alternates back and forth between two timelines, which not all people like, but was very easy to follow. I felt so lost (in a good way) in this book, mesmerized by the way the story and the characters just drew me in. I love how even though there were two different timelines, it all just came together at the end, complete with a happy ending. You couldn’t ask for anything more. I really enjoyed this one. If you’re looking for a light read with crystal balls, tarot cards, mystery, romance and more, this is a book for you!
Thank you Netgalley, Ruth Hogan and William Morrow and Custom House for the opportunity to read and review this book. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Really loved this book. Haven’t read one like this In a while. One that pulls you in and makes you feel happy by the end of it.

Keeping a promise. A long time Brighton pier staple is retiring after decades of reading Tarot cards and people. Madame Burova is ready to give up her space to someone new. Madame must fulfill one last promise in order to retire in peace. It is a journey of a lost time and forgotten friendships that sets the future on its inevitable course. Happy reading

Great story!
I loved the audiobook!

Description
From the wildly popular bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost Things—an uplifting, slightly magical story about how it’s never too late to find out who you really are.

"Ruth Hogan is the queen of uplifting fiction and Madame Burova reminds us why. The writing crackles with humor and warmth. I can't imagine a better book in which to lose yourself at the moment. Stunning, immersive and absolutely wonderful." --Annie Lyons, author of The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett

Madame Burova—beloved Tarot reader, palmist, and clairvoyant—is retiring and leaving her booth on the Brighton seafront.

After inheriting her mother’s fortune-telling business as a young woman, Imelda Burova has spent her life on the Brighton pier practicing her trade. She and her trusty pack of Tarot cards have seen the lovers and the liars, the angels and the devils, the dreamers and the fools. Now, after a lifetime of keeping other people’s secrets, Madam Burova is ready to have a little piece of life for herself. But she still has one last thing to do—to fulfill a promise made in the 1970s, when she and her girlfriends were carefree, with their whole lives still before them.

3.5 Stars

Madame Burova is a tarot card reader. I don't know anything about tarot cards or palm reading, but I did enjoy the dual -timeline story from the 1970s to the present day in London.

Ruth Hogan can do no wrong! I loved this book!

Madame Burova is a psychic who is ready to retire her tarot cards and close her fortune telling business at Brighton Pier. Before she can move on, she has a promise she intends to keep that she made many years ago when she was young. Is it too late to set things right?

This book had it all! A vibrant seaside setting, a heartfelt and deeply emotional storyline, characters you will become deeply invested in, and so much more!

I really enjoyed The Keeper of Lost Things, so when Netgalley sent me a copy of The Moon, the Stars, and Madame Burova.. I was so excited to read it. Ruth Hogan did it again. The story spans fifty years and tells the story of Madame Burivo. She is a Tarot reader who has been working for years in Brighton. The business was her mothers and she has loving kept it going for years. All the locals love her. She knows their secrets, their lies, their schemes and their loves. It is coming time for her to retire but she has one more promise to keep. She owes it to her and her girlfriends.. she will see it through.
While Madame is in Brighton, Billie is in London..is trying to keep her life together. She has lost her job, her marriage when she finds out about something that changes her world. She is rocked to her core. She needs to find answers and settle her unease and make things right and her journey leads her right to Madame.
The story is told throughout the years. Ruth Hogan is a magical story teller. As we pass through the years, you really become part of the story.young people make choices and have to learn to live with the consequences. And eventually everyone has to make peace with the past and set things right… this was a 4 star read for me.. I loved getting lost in the story.. I hope you like it as much as I did.

The Moon, The Stars and Madame Burova immersed me in a 1970s seaside entertainment camp and the mystery of a baby left outside of Madame Burova's fortune telling booth along the pier.

Imelda has grown up in her mother's booth, learning how to read tarot cards and palms, and at long last, it is her time to assume the business on her own and become Madame Burova. Her reputation earns her a spot at Larkin's Entertainment Camp providing readings to the guests. While she is there, she meets the dashing Cillian Bryne, a Wall of Death rider. While she is inexplicably drawn to him, another young woman has eyes for him as well and plans to have no one stand in her way.

Some 50 years later, Billie is recently divorced and trying to adjust to having lost both of her parents as well. She receives a letter from her father informing her that she was adopted, having been abandoned on the pier. While Billie tries to process this new information, she receives another letter from Madame Burova (Imelda) who has been holding secrets to Billie's past. Billie meets Madame Burova and begins to search for the answers to her birth mother and father.

I really enjoyed this novel for the unique and beautifully developed characters. It is a diverse cast and each person seems to come to life from the pages. I loved the setting and time frame of the novel as well. At times, it was a heartbreaking read, but also there was so much beauty and love within the pages as well.

I received this book courtesy of the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

3.25 stars

After reading and loving The Keeper of Lost Things last year, I knew that I had to get my hands on this latest release of Ruth Hogan's. While I ended up enjoying the book overall, there were quite a few things about it that I didn't think really worked in telling this particular story.

1. The prologue really does draw you in, but the first few chapters after it are quite a slog to get through. There is so much exposition Hogan is doing to set up all of these perspectives and subplots and it honestly took me out of the story to the point where I considered DNFing this book. Once we got to the point where the two stories started to intersect, though, it did get better.
2. The dual timelines along with the various subplots, to me, overcrowded the novel at the expense of the character building. I understand that Hogan wanted to give all of these little vignettes to provide local color and to create this epic story that spans generations, but it led to our protagonists Imelda and Billie being a bit one-dimensional. Considering how the other plotlines get abandoned over time, it really seemed like the novel would have benefited from just being the stories of those two women with the side characters just appearing in both timelines.
3. Considering how the entire novel is built around this big reveal for Billie, it ends up coming so late in the novel that it gets glossed over. I really think that if Hogan wanted to keep this book at its current length, she could have trimmed a bit from the beginning so that we could give the reveal the impact it deserved.

I do think that Hogan is a talented writer, but this one just had some glaring issues for me that I could not overlook. I am hoping that this is just an exception, though, and I look forward to reading more of her writing in the future, whether it be a new release or something from her backlist.

Thank you to William Morrow Paperbacks for an ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review!

This was my first Ruth Hogan novel and I have to say I was so entranced by it. The storyline is split between the early 70's where the reader meets Imelda Burova, a half gypsy beginning her calling in the family business of Tarot cards and palm reading; and present day where Madame Burova is set to retire but not before tying up one last loose end with young woman named Billie.

Set in a seaside English town, I loved the way Hogan described her characters and the settings. The characters have such a quirkiness and humor between all of them. The only downside I found was that there are A LOT of characters to keep track of.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and will certainly seek out other Hogan novels in the future. Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for a copy of this novel.

Loved it. Didn't want to love it, but there you go. Hooked by the story line right away. Every Halloween until I was deemed too old, I went as a Gypsy, the most alluring, beguiling, mystical people I could imagine. They traveled, danced, told everyone what was what, and took care of their own. And - not to be diminished by listing it last - as far as I could tell they wore the most beautiful clothes, bright and brilliant, had the best fashion sense I'd ever seen in all my 12 years.

Imelda and her family, her community drew me in and when the story folds in Billie who is looking for her people. . . I was happy to be on the ride. I don't like romance, but sometimes sacrifices must be made in order to get to the satisfaction at the end. Take that any way you want.

Tarot card reading, crystal balls, meeting with a Madame Burova and asking those pressing questions. . . .the story appealed to me. What would I ask? (I actually did meet with one once - she was old and very pragmatic. I had no question as I didn't want to give her clues. She pierced me with her marbly eyes and had one comment before her hand came out for her fee. "You'd better do something. You're not getting any younger." Oy.)

100% entertainment for me - no big lessons or doctrinal scraps to keep close forever - but so many touchstones that reminded me of moments in my life. . . .where the character and I have a shared spark. That's a great read.

A Sincere Thank you to Ruth Hogan, William Morrow and Custom House and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review. #TheMoontheStarsandMadameBurova #NetGalley

LOVED loved loved this book.

The writing had me captivated from the start to finish, and I found myself reading it almost straight through one sitting. I look forward to reading more by this author.

I received an ARC of this book by the publisher via Netgalley in an exchange for an honest review.

I've been reading tarot for over 15 years and so I read the synopsis for this book I was very excited. This book is an easy read which flips back-and-forth between 1973 and today. At the heart of it is a mystery as to who Billie's parents were amongst a cast of characters that all worked together at a Brighton hotel resort in the 70's. The mystery is a good one, and it takes the majority of the book figure out who did who in the library with a candlestick (we're going to walk away from that joke and pretend it never happened).

However there's something odd about this book. It felt like everything was surface-level. The characters, the love story, the exploration of difficult societal issues in the 70's, the side plots, the twists, etc. It felt like a first draft to me, where the writer gets the bones of the story down and from there in the second draft they fill out the plot. I couldn't sink into the story because it almost felt like an outline. Also a minor qualm is that I personally didn't agree with how a lot of the tarot cards were interpreted. However, everyone reads the cards differently and Hogan did a much better job compared to a lot of writers using the tarot cards within the story.

I'd describe this book like a Snickers bar, it's a nice quick read and will keep your attention. However long-term you probably won't remember much of it because Snickers don't particularly standout in your memory. 3 out of 5 stars.

This is the second Ruth Hogan book I’ve read & I had the same feelings about both of them. They were perfectly fine, middle of the road books, but nothing terribly exciting that I’d rush out to recommend to someone else.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. I really enjoyed this book. The novel moved a bit slowly and at times I couldn't quite figure out what the main focus of the book was. But the characters were lovely, they were very well written and it felt like they were real people.