I have been a fan of Maxine’s work for a little while now. I love the way in which she creates loveable characters and writes heart warming stories. I read the synopsis for ‘Things Are Looking Up’ and it certainly sounded like a fun read. I couldn’t wait to start reading and so I jumped straight in. I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Things Are Looking Up’ but more about that in a bit. I loved the character of Milly and I warmed to her from the start. In fact I felt like she had become a friend of mine. Milly is basically a workaholic, who focused on work to get her over her heartbreak after her relationship broke up. She works freelance so she knows that if she wants to earn pennies, she needs a constant social media presence. She becomes almost welded to her phone which puts her life in danger. During her enforced recovery, Milly reassesses just what and who is important to her. I kept everything crossed that things would work out for her in the end and that she would get the ‘Happy Ever After’ ending that she so deserved. What happens? Well for the answer to that question and so much more then you are just going to have to read the book to find out as I am not going to tell you. It took me no time at all to get into ‘Things Are Looking Up’. In fact by the time I got to the bottom of the first page, I knew that I was in for a treat. To say that reading ‘Things Are Looking Up’ became addictive seems a huge understatement. I picked the book up only intending to read a couple of chapters to fill in the odd half hour but I became so wrapped up in the story that I was still sat there reading over two hours later. I loved the character of Milly and I liked the sound of Jed so I had to keep reading to see if they got together or not. This book made me chuckle on several occasions. I found ‘Things Are Looking Up’ to be a charming and fun read. ‘Things Are Looking Up’ is well written. The author certainly knows how to grab your attention from the start and draw you into this compelling story. I love the vivid and realistic way in which Maxine describes her characters. She makes them sound so realistic that they seem just as real as you and I. For me, ‘Things Are Looking Up’ is perfectly paced. The story starts with a bang (quite literally) and then maintains a gentle pace throughout. I felt as though I was part of the story myself and that’s thanks to Maxine’s very vivid and realistic storytelling. In short, I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Things Are Looking Up’ and I would recommend it to other readers. I look forward to reading more of Maxine’s work in the future. The score on the Ginger Book Geek board is a very well deserved 5* out of 5*.

A fabulous up-to-date novel about life, love and mistakes made along the way. Milly has worked long and hard for her dream job, committing herself 24/7 to her career and, finally, she is on the verge of achieving success – a position at Vogue magazine. Then they change the time of her interview and she has her head down, focusing on her mobile phone and misses the bus bearing down on her. When she next opens her eyes, the reality of her situation comes crashing down; she has lost everything she’s worked for and her life has imploded. Then her ex, Jed, re-enters her life and as she convalesces, Milly wonders if she can work her way back to where she was or, then again, if life has more to offer? This is a touching read from an author with a good insight into the life of a modern woman. Milly is easy to identify with; we’ve all known someone who commits everything to their career to the detriment of everything else in life. I admired Milly – she’s a very loveable character but not without her flaws – well, let’s face it, few of us are! This is a lovely story, beautifully told but there were a couple of inconsistencies which niggled at me. However, it was still a delightful, entertaining read and one I’m happy to give four stars.

Milly is a freelance fashion writer on her way to the interview of her life with British Vogue when her pre-occupation with her mobile phone leads to her being mown down by a London bus. Fast-forward a week and Milly comes out of a coma with cracked ribs, a broken arm, cuts and bruises. Worse, a week in hospital has meant that Milly has missed numerous deadlines and she has lost all her regular columns and writing work. Then to put a cherry on a really poobah week, her landlady serves her notice on the awful flat they share, because Milly clearly won't be able to pay the rent with no work coming in. Only through her time in hospital does Milly realise that she has prioritised her career over friends, over family, and over love. But when the chips are down the only people there to support her are her family and her ex-boyfriend Jed. I can only describe this as a mash-up/retelling of A Little Princess, with a smoosh of the film Overboard (which actually is probably a modern, grown-up version of A Little Princess anyway), a whisper of A Christmas Carol and just about every Hallmark movie ever made. Milly was clearly a 'bad person' pre her encounter with the bus, she even missed her nephew's sole speaking line at the school play. She is glued to her phone 24/7 and pays no attention to friends and family. Unfortunately, for me, Milly's road to enlightenment is less of a road and more of a doorstep. Within a day or two of waking up (it seems) bad Milly is no more and now we have caring sharing Milly who wanders around London with her eyes wide open seeing all the parts of London she never had time for before. She talks to random strangers on the bus and in a church (TBH at this point I suspected that there might be some woo-woo higher power at work, but luckily that fear was unfounded), she enters into conversations with the local bookshop owner and the Italian who owns the deli round the corner. And now Jed, Jed is a self-made millionaire who devotes a lot of time to charity and other good works, he dates a super-model heiress and seems to work from home an awful lot. A self-made millionaire under the age of 30 who only seems to work part-time - He must be a unicorn. I'm writing this with raging insomnia and so I am being particularly snarky but this novel relies on a series of coincidences to make things work. Is it really likely that one week in a coma would mean that Milly would have missed every single deadline, surely some of her columns would have been monthly? Is it also likely that the entire industry would completely blank her, even after she explained about the coma, and especially when she was always quick to help others out in the past (surely in the Hallmark film this is where all her former clients and mentees would turn up with offers of work, or at least a box of chocolates)? Then because of the aforementioned landlady and having no money and her brother having building work done the only place Milly can stay is in Jed's penthouse apartment? And there's more but I won't spoil things that happen later in the book. Overall, this was a pleasant enough read, but totally predictable from start to finish, it needed more subtlety, more light and dark. The characters felt too one-dimensional. For example, Milly's brother confiscates her phone, rightly blaming her accident on Milly's obsession with emails and social media. But then later when she doesn't answer four calls from him he isn't the least bit concerned - if I called someone who was glued to their phone and they didn't answer/call me back within a few hours I'd be contacting the police! I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.