Welcome to JuliaPalooza today for my stop on the Blog Tour for THE CRAFT ROOM by Dave Holwill, which is available now (links below) – currently FREE on Kindle!
About the book
Sylvia Blackwell is tired. Her grandchildren are being kept away from her, and the expected inheritance that might finally get her middle-aged son to move out has failed to materialise – thanks to her mother’s cat. It is becoming increasingly difficult to remain composed. On a romantic clifftop walk for her 47th Wedding Anniversary, an unexpected opportunity leads to a momentous decision that will irretrievably change the course of her life. The Craft Room is a darkly comic tale of sex, crepe paper, murder and knitting in a sleepy Devon town, with a ‘truly original’ premise and genuinely jaw-dropping moments. What would you do if unexpectedly freed from bondage you never knew you were in? How would your children cope? How far would you go to protect them from an uncomfortable truth? You can only push a grandmother so far…
Goodreads | Amazon UK | Amazon US
The Craft Room is a brilliantly bonkers, blackly comic farce but it is probably not for the faint-hearted (or cat lovers…) 🙀
Black comedy is one of my favourite film genres and it is great to find a book in the same vein. I loved Sylvia and her dynamic awakening throughout the book. Any woman who is that devoted to achieving crafting nirvana is alright by me! Poor hapless Robert is wimpishly sympathetic and good cop / pretty hopeless cop, Frank and Don were a great double act.
The humorous plot is well-crafted, starting at awkward, hurtling through screwball and becoming progressively more manic as the story draws to its unexpected climax.
Dave Holwill has put together a fabulous cast of characters, an increasingly wild plot and some laugh out loud one-liners to create a very entertaining, you-didn’t-know-you-needed-it-until-it-was-here, combination of Serial Mom, Rambo and Blue Peter 🙂
Huge thanks to Dave Holwill for my copy of The Craft Room and to Rachel Gilbey of Rachel’s Random Resources for my stop on the blog tour!
If you enjoyed my review, please consider liking and/or sharing and, of course, buying the book: Goodreads | Amazon UK | Amazon US
About the Author
Dave Holwill was born in Guildford in 1977 and quickly decided that he preferred the Westcountry – moving to Devon in 1983 (with some input from his parents). After an expensive (and possibly wasted) education there, he has worked variously as a postman, a framer, and a print department manager (though if you are the only person in the department then can you really be called a manager?) all whilst continuing to play in every kind of band imaginable on most instruments you can think of. His debut novel, Weekend Rockstars, was published in August 2016 to favourable reviews and his second The Craft Room (a very dark comedy concerning death through misadventure) came out in August 2017. He is currently in editing hell with the third.
About the Blog Tour
Please check out the rest of the stops on the tour for The Craft Room:
juliapalooza.com 