Books Under the Blanket (with a flashlight)

Almost exactly five years ago, I wrote a post about how I select books and that I do judge a book by its cover (It’s the “Blank” for Me). But Amanda Prowse has been an automatic must-read for me since about 2018. I pre-order her books sight unseen and description unread. When I order them, I don’t care what the titles are, what the covers look like, or what they’re about. The covers include the name Amanda Prowse, so I’m going to read them regardless of what they’re about. 🤷🏼‍♀️ So when I started reading the book reviewed below, I didn’t know a thing about the story.

I scheduled Ever After for two potential review dates—August 10 if I had been approved for an ARC on NetGalley (I wasn’t) or September 14 to give me time to read the book after its release date. I have reviews scheduled out pretty far in advance. It helps me with planning and keeps my TBR list organized. As I write this, I’m actually scheduled out through the end of February. I also have nine NetGalley ARC requests pending, which would take me well into April.

Did I know when I scheduled this that it was about a widow who lost her husband three years prior to an unnamed illness that the doctor diagnosed? An illness he knew would take his life eventually so he did things around the house so his wife wouldn’t have to worry about them after he was gone? An illness that seems an awful lot like something that starts with a C and ends with an R and stirs up sad memories? No…no I did not. If I had known, I would have tried to schedule this later in the year because, honestly, mentally preparing to write this post and review now was really, really hard.

But I have said before that the universe has a funny way of sending us reminders of the people we have loved and lost.

Two years ago just before Dennis’s birthday in July, I reviewed The Beauty of Rain about a woman who tragically loses her husband and young son (Celebrate Life Before the Afterlife). The overarching theme is live the life you want to live while you can. Tell people you love them. Spend time with the people who are important to you. The release date was Dennis’s birthday. A couple months later, I finished When the Rain Ends about a mother and daughter navigating life after a significant family loss, and I shared Corinne’s college essay, where she talked about losing her dad (Navigating Obstacles and Life Lessons).

Last year, I happened to slot in a book called Get Lucky, in which the main character gets pregnant with twins due on Corinne’s birthday in October but scheduled for a C-section on the anniversary of the day Dennis died (Four Years Gone in a Heartbeat).

Just this June, I picked up Abscond, an Amazon First Reads Bonus Short. I had never heard of the author, had no idea what the story was, but the book was free. Since it was short, I shifted something else to squeeze it in, and it gave me a little time to get ahead on reviews with a quick read. It was a story of a boy who loses his father, and I happened to schedule it between our wedding anniversary and Dennis’s birthday (The Universe Has a Way of Reminding Us).

There have been others where the timing just seems uncanny, but you get the idea. And now my favorite Amanda Prowse has released this beautiful story of a woman considering learning to love again, a woman who despises the word “widow” as much as I do. And I just happened to schedule it the week of the fifth anniversary of when I became a widow.

Five years have passed since we lost Dennis, and we miss him every day—five years that sometimes feel like forever and other times feel like just a moment. I do not have any inclination to seek out a new love like Enya Brown. Dennis wasn’t perfect, but he was perfect for me. He gave me a home; a huge extended family; and a beautiful, kind, intelligent, amazing daughter. And he gave me a love I never expected at a time in my life when I wasn’t even looking.

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 Stars for Ever After by Amanda Prowse

412 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: August 12, 2025
Purchased on Amazon.

Publisher’s Description

If you’re given another chance at love, shouldn’t you take it?

Enya’s life has become small. Her husband’s death has left her bereft, and though she’s only in her early fifties, she’s happiest looking after her son, Aiden, his childhood sweetheart, Holly, and her beloved cat, Pickle.

So the spark she feels for the stranger who bumps into her car in the airport car park is a complete shock. But Enya can’t stop thinking about him.

Then, when Aiden makes a life-changing decision, Enya suddenly finds her close-knit community thrown into chaos. Her best friend, Jenny, isn’t speaking to her, Aiden’s future hangs in the balance, Holly is devastated, and the stranger from the car park is suddenly in her life.

Torn between family, love and loyalty, Enya faces a dilemma: stay safely where she is, or take a leap into the unknown? Because maybe her happily-ever-after could have one more chapter yet…

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Main Characters:

• Enya Brown – mid-50s, widowed three years prior but still talks to her late husband Jonathan and sees him around the house, mother to Aiden, works for a solicitors’ firm that is about to close because the owners are retiring, planning to buy into and start working at her best friend’s florist shop
• Aiden Brown – Enya’s son, 27 years old, works as a robotics engineer, Holly is his childhood sweetheart
• Jenny and Phil Hudson – Enya and Jonathan’s best friends and neighbors, their families have lived two houses apart for decades and have always been friends, parents to Holly, Jenny owns a florist shop, Phil is a police officer
• Holly Hudson – Jenny and Phil’s daughter, social media influencer who does videos about baking, head over heels in love with Aiden
• HCK – Handsome Car Klutz who crashed into Enya’s car after she drops Aiden at the airport for a work trip, she can’t stop thinking about him and flirting with him over the phone
• Angela Rudd – Enya’s older sister, married to Frank, the third of the best friend triangle between Enya and Jenny
• Trish and Dominic Sutherland – relatively well-off couple who live about an hour from Enya in Bath, Iris’s parents, Dominic runs his own commercial architecture firm
• Iris Sutherland – Trish and Dominic’s daughter

Amanda Prowse’s latest release, Ever After, reads like a classic example of “when it rains, it pours.” Enya Brown’s life revolves around the small circle of people who make up her family and friends—her son Aiden, his long-term girlfriend and childhood sweetheart Holly, her neighbor and best friend Jenny, her sister Angela, and her cat Pickle. She desperately misses her husband Jonathan, who passed three years ago, but all in all, her life isn’t horrible. She is surrounded by people she loves who love her in return.

On the verge of leaving her job because the owners are retiring, Enya has a plan for her future. Jenny invited Enya to become a partner in Jenny’s florist shop, so Enya is looking forward to the slower pace and working side by side with her very best friend. She talks to Jonathan as if he is still very much alive and uses him as a sounding board for anything that she might need guidance on.

Then one morning, she drops Aiden at the airport for a three-week business trip. In the parking lot, her car gets sideswiped by a man driving a little too quickly. But Enya is not only faced with the fact that she now has to repair her car. She surprises herself with her reaction to this man, who she finds quite attractive and charming. She finds herself feeling things she hasn’t really felt since Jonathan died.

The extremely apologetic man texts Enya his e-mail and phone number so they can discuss repairs later, and Enya saves his number in her phone…as HKC, Handsome Car Klutz. 🤭 She tells her sister about him. She starts thinking about him, spends time talking with him, wonders if she’s being disloyal to Jonathan somehow because she never thought about being attracted to anyone else. In a word, Enya is smitten.

The story takes quite a turn after this sweet beginning though. Prowse was not described by the Daily Mail as “the queen of family drama” for nothing, after all. Aiden returns from Rome, and Enya’s entire life is turned upside down again and again and again. I don’t want to give away those moments because they are powerful parts of this story. Suffice it to say, just when you think things can’t get worse for Enya, they get worse…but true to form for Prowse, she has a way of making family drama work itself out in the end.

As readers, we get to deeply know Prowse’s characters and fall in love with all of them, even when her books are told from a single point of view like this one. Jenny texts Enya in the middle of the night for a chocolate fix. Angela calls from her vacation with their parents and seems to be enjoying herself, quite the opposite of Enya who would much rather stay home. Aiden lives on his own with Holly, but they both still depend on their parents as if they weren’t almost 30.

But what I love most about Prowse is her ability to make her readers understand and feel all the feelings her characters feel. She writes so beautifully and seems to always have exactly the right words.

• “…it was huge. I mean it was nothing, but it was the first time I’ve felt, I don’t know how to say it, like I wanted to spend some time with someone, I wanted to look at him. Wanted to touch him.”
• “To truly know if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you need to spend a wet weekend with them walking around Woolworths. You need to bicker, run out of money and steam, you need to nurse them when they’ve a cold and be disgusted by how they dunk biscuits in tea until they’re mush and then eat them.”
• “…love doesn’t need approval or permission, it just arrives, and we all have to make space for it.”
• “I now know those were the last three things I would do as the old me. Those simple actions before my life was changed forever….And I guess the weirdest thing for me is that I never saw it coming. I would have thought that with a monumental change right around the corner, destiny about to smack me in the face with a plank, I would have had some kind of warning, an inkling, an idea, but no, nothing.”

At the start, I expected a story about Enya’s struggle to move forward and seek out love again without losing her connection to her late husband. This turned into so much more. Enya’s story deals with grief and loss, friendship and love, family and betrayal, guilt and reconciliation. It really does run the gamut of emotions. And it was amazing.

P.S. Despite the fact that this truly is Enya’s story, I think Iris is my favorite character of them all. Yes, the Iris that we know the least about. Judge for yourself, but I’m sticking with Iris. Just sayin’. 😉

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