Very well written and well-told story about a woman who has to reinvent herself by finding herself and returning to her childhood home town. The family endures much turmoil, but they are able to come together. The story flows and comes together and the characters are well developed.

A beautifully written story about taking control of one's life, facing challenges and learning how to survive loss and love. Forced to face a life that was previously left behind--it is a book that engages the reader and never lets go. Thank you for having given me the opportunity to read this title prior to publication---it stayed with me long after the last word was read.

I found this book well written, If a little predictable. Certainly it showed that money does not necessarily make you happy and that there is always hope even when life has dealt you cruel blows. Well worth reading.

I felt that although well written the book was quite obvious, no surprises and not very original.
It was rags ro riches in reverse. Nina looses her husband and everything she has - and she has a lot- in the first few pages and is left struggling to fend for herself and her two children. She has never worked and is not qualified to do anything so suffers numerous knock backs before eventually finding something to keep their heads above water.
A somewhat depressing tale where everyone who is poor was kind and those who were rich were not. Too much generalising, this book was not for me

Pleasant story of how a family adapts when the father dies in a road accident leaving behind an insolvent company and huge debt. No plots or intrigues and few characters. It's the sort of book that is good to read coming off the back of more challenging fiction but offers the reader little to get excited about.

Another great book by Amanda Prowse. A good story with believable characters.

This book started out really good but for me became boring
I was expecting a bigger revolation than just a women going back to her roots and starting over with nothing

It was alright. The popular trope of 'wife who knows nothing about finances and is suddenly widowed pulls up her bootstraps to take care of her kids' has been done pretty often in contemporary fiction and this one didn't depart much from that. I found Nina to be a sympathetic character overall but the kids and sister were a bit one-dimensional. It could have been that there were a few dragging sections of the book but it was overall a slow-moving read that could be a bit boring at times.

I will say though that I liked the ending and thought it was perfect for the story. I appreciate that it leaves with the characters all embarking on new journeys to find out more about themselves. It's not a happily ever after, it's a 'let's see what comes next' and I thought that hopeful tone was nice to the 'she found another man' ending that usually comes along with these stories.

Note: I received a free Kindle edition of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I would like to thank NetGalley, the publisher Lake Union Publishing, and the author Amanda Prowse for the opportunity to do so.

I have to say that this book was not for me. It was interesting to see Nina slowly thinking more and more about her relationship with her husband and realising how little control she had; how little she knew about what was going on in her life.

The portrayal of the children I found a bit off. Obviously they were upset by all the changes in their life and sometimes they rallied around their mother, but a lot of the time when they were being nice to the mum, it felt a bit false and unlike something a teenager would actually do or say. And when they weren't being nice to their mother it felt a bit like a cliché teenage getting upset about moving house/ losing their father.

To be honest I was a bit bored. A lot happened, but there wasn't much to interest me. After everything was uncovered about the Finn and their finances, there just wasn't much of a hook to keep me reading.

It's easy to overlook life's responsibilities when they're filed away in someone else's "to-do" box, but what happens when life dumps the box out onto your lap?

Nina lives a fairytale life in a mega-fancy home situated in an idyllic setting. Her husband vowed to take care of her and their two sons, who attend a posh private school and are on the fast track to a glorious future. But when a car crash turns their world upside down, Nina finds out more than she ever wanted to know.

Life is a mess. An incredible, devastating, horrendously surprising mess. Even Nina's own bad decisions from the past come knocking and the nightmare she's hoping to wake from only grows bigger by the day.

And solutions are not always pretty.

This story is one no woman wants to experience, in fact, most don't even want to admit that the reality of this situation exists. But they do.

If you don't want to hear that a woman/wife/mother has frailties, even naiveties, then don't read this book. If, however, you are a realist and understand that others may have lives different from your own, then by all means pick up this book. It's written well and tells a story that will linger with you. I'm glad I read it and I'll be watching for more books written by this author.

This novel was provided to me by NetGallery in exchange for an honest review.

This is the second of Amanda Prowse's books that I have read. She has a knack at telling great stories about families and the challenges of modern day living. This book was no exception. I was almost overwhelmed myself as I got into this story of a family's world that seems to literally fall apart in days. The reading was easy and the story was compelling. The lessons underlying the story are clear and hopeful. Family and a life lived true to oneself are so much more valuable than things. This is a delightful story that took me from tears to cheers.
I recommend this to readers who enjoy underdog stories, especially when they involve women. This book shouldn't be categorized as a chic-lit read, but rather an inspirational story about a woman who finds herself when she seems to have lost everything else.
My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this title.

Another Amanda Prowse winner!

When Nina McCarrick finds herself in serious debt and not home after her husband dies in a car accident she must do the one thing she never thought she would. She returns to her hometown and moves in with her sister whom she thought she left behind years ago. Together, with her sister's help she begins to rebuild her life, a life that includes her sons, a life she never thought she would be living.

The story was wonderfully written, full of emotion and shows just how much we can accomplish when we chose to rule life instead of having life ruling us.

This is a good example of why you should read outside your usual genres. Hooked in by the blurb, I wasn’t expecting such a compelling story that would make me think about all the things we take for granted.
It’s clear from the first page that Nina McCarrick’s life is far from perfect, so it’s good that we don’t have to wait long before the phone call that changes her whole world forever. In turns, I felt incredulous at Nina’s extreme naivety and impressed by her resilience.

I would have been tempted to give this a five star review, as it became one of those books that I looked forward to getting back to but I suspect other readers will have the same issues as me.
I’m no expert but all I had to do was a quick internet search to find she would have been receiving £34.40 ($45) a week until her boys reached the age of sixteen and was entitled to several other state benefits, including housing benefit and jobseekers allowance. This should have at least been mentioned – as well as why no one, including her street-wise sister didn’t ever think of telling Nina to seek advice on her entitlements.

Any book which makes you think about how you treat your friends and family has to be good. The Art of Hiding becomes a story of one woman’s redemption that I’ll remember for a long time.

It’s difficult to find a balance between reading only what pleases you and stretching your horizons from time to time. I like to try to be open minded and read a bit of everything but there are definitely certain genres that I avoid because I just don’t find them to my tastes personally. Not one to turn away free books, I accepted an offer to read Amanda Prowse’s recent release, The Art of Hiding, even though it falls into a subgenre of “women’s lit” that I usually avoid. While it is an incredible example of that genre and certainly addresses valuable themes related to personal identity and self-worth, it speaks to those themes with a heavy handedness I personally find annoying and distracting.

Nina and her husband, Finn, are well off and their sons go to a prestigious school, but she has never forgotten what it was like growing up in a very different environment. When her husband dies suddenly in a car accident, Nina’s world is turned upside down, but for more reasons than just losing the man she loved and her children their father. She learns that they were in fact, greatly in debt—bankrupt, actually—and it feels like the blows fall relentlessly in the immediate aftermath of that emotional toll. Nina must confront her relationship with her past while negotiating single-parenthood and the reevaluation of everything she thought she knew about her husband and their marriage.

One subtle choice that I greatly appreciated through the novel was the choice for the reader never to “meet” Nina’s husband, Finn, directly. With his death early on, all the accounts and depictions of him in the book are filtered through characters’ varying perspectives. There is no definitive hold anyone can have on Finn. This makes navigating a novel focused so closely on Nina’s perspective more interesting. Her grief and her sons’ grief are tangible but the reader remains detached at a personal level from Finn himself. It forces the reader to identify with Nina and assess Finn along the way with each new scrap of information, each new insight offered. Nina’s insights and revelations about her marriage and what her relationship with Finn did to her sense of self show the complexity of navigating relationships and how much work must go into them in order to also stay independent and self-contained people. It shows that even with genuine love and affection on both sides, intimacy and trust don’t necessarily follow naturally.

While much is made of Nina’s relationship with her older sister and there are flashes of their childhood and the impact of their mother’s death, I had a difficult time connecting to that plot and that relationship. The details are all there and there are brief glimpses but where having the memories of Finn filtered through Nina’s memory and establishing that distance worked, I think in this case it hurts the reader’s understanding of their relationship. It feels informed instead of genuine. When they fight, there are clearly deeper issues at play but the reader is only ever told about the origins of those issues rather than seeing them first-hand. Even when Nina remembers them, it’s from a very different perspective than what it would be if there were short third-person flashbacks scattered through the text.

So I suppose my disappointment with the novel’s “heavy-handedness” could really be a side effect of the novel’s limited perspective, which is an issue I have with many novels structured that way. But, that comes down to personal preference as much as anything.

I was sent an uncorrected proof of The Art of Hiding by Amanda Prowse to read and review by NetGalley
This is the first Novel by Amanda Prowse that I have read. It is a ‘riches to rags’ tale of protagonist Nina and her sons having to cope with a drastic change in their lives after suffering tragedy. Nina, although coming from a poor background has become used to a wealthy lifestyle as a stay at home mum, her sole purpose being to care for her husband and children. This all changes very suddenly and the family must learn to survive outside the moneyed cocoon that they have all taken for granted.
As the story unfolded, it felt rather like the author was waging a personal attack on the privileged and wealthy, painting them all as soulless and heartless while all the poor people we encountered were happy, hardworking, helpful and welcoming. It seemed to me that the portrayal of the great divide was a somewhat sweeping generalization on both sides and was reinforced at every opportunity. That said, I did quite enjoy the book and I think that readers may find themselves thinking about their own lives and what they possibly take for granted and the happiness that can be found in the smallest things.

I received this book "The Art of Hiding" from Netgalley for my honest review.

I found that this book was just okay for me. I read a lot of books and this was one that took a while before I was actually involved with the characters. This was almost a DNF for me but I push threw to read to the end.

I don't feel I can leave a proper review as I could not finish the book. I had a family emergency and every time I picked up this book, it made me more depressed.
I have read others by Amanda Prowse and liked them. It was probably just a bad time for me to read this particular story. I won't be posting reviews anywhere.

A story of what happens when you lose everything you thought you had and then you realise the life you thought you had wasn't what you thought it was. A really gripping story that just makes you want to keep reading more.

This is not a book I would normally pick up to read but I was captured by the beautiful cover! Only a few chapters into the book, I found myself wanting to keep reading to discover this family's future. While I couldn't quite relate to Nina's situation, I was drawn in by the author's writing. Amanda Prowse has a gift when drawing attention to emotion. The reader feels empathy for her characters. Highly recommend this book.

*Thank you to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*

Unfortunately, although I managed to finish it, I could not get on with this book.

The story and characters were cliched, the plot obvious and the dialogue was bizarre - especially when it came to the kids.

I was expecting something harder-hitting and more emotional. Something a bit more unusual, but this felt very, very 'writing by numbers'.