The Lido is a wonderful feel good story about 20 something Kate and 86 year old Rosemary. They meet and become friends when Kate is sent to interview Rosemary about her fight to save the neighborhood Lido, the outdoor pool she has swum in her entire life. As the story progresses, Kate learns so much about life and love from Rosemary, and it helps her become a stronger, more fulfilled woman, and to really see the world around her. This novel is strong on the importance of friendship and community, and how they influence and shape our lives. I found it very moving at times, and hope to read more by this author in the future. Many thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the e-arc! Loved it! A perfect summer read.

A feel-good story about a mission to save a community swimming pool. While this story was heart-warming, it was missing some character depth and at times, dragged. Perhaps worth a quick read by the poo this summer.

The Lido is a charming heartwarming story about a community's efforts to save a beloved swimming spot. The local pool is in jeopardy from a corporation that wants to privatize it and create an exclusive club instead. The campaign to save the lido is spearheaded by Rosmary, a fixture at the lido, and sad, pathetic journalist, Kate. Along the way, Kate pulls herself out of her depression by actively engaging in her community. The entire community pulls together to save their beloved landmark, illustrating the power of people. The end is sweet, it sad.

It’s been years since I’ve gone swimming but after reading The Lido, I am eager to get to a pool and dive right in. The Lido tells the story of an outdoor public pool in Brixton, England and the people who love it. The city council is threatening to close the lido because it is financially unsustainable and as luck would have it, there is an eager buyer — Paradise Living, a property company, that wants to convert it into a members-only tennis court.

The Lido centers around new friends Rosemary (86 years old) and Kate (in her 20s) who band together with the community to save the beloved pool. It is also the story of Kate, a young journalist who struggles with what appears to be a Panic Disorder. She feels very much alone since moving to Brixton and appreciates her new friendship with Rosemary, who she has met while writing a story about the threatened pool closure. In return for an interview, Rosemary tells Kate that she must go swimming there. Rosemary has been swimming at the lido for 80+ years and it was a special place for her and her husband George who recently passed away. For Rosemary, the lido is a way of remembering George because many of her fondest memories were ones she shared with him at the Lido. Kate learns to love the lido as well as the community members she gets to know through Rosemary.

The Lido is a warm, friendly, lighthearted, and enjoyable story that would be perfect as a beach read or better yet, out by a pool. The central characters are fully developed via the current story as well as their respective backstories. They are very likable and you can’t help but enjoy spending time with them. The story flowed well and there weren’t any parts that felt like filler. It kept me engrossed, wanting to find out what ultimately happens to the lido and these caring characters. It is Libby Page’s debut novel and I am hoping she will share more stories with us in the future.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you Simon and Schuster Inc. and #NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book before it is published in July. I truly enjoyed it. A Heartwarming story about friendship, community, standing up for what is important and self acceptance/realization. If you enjoyed Britt Marie was Here, or The Storied Life of AJ Fikery, give this a chance, I promise it won't disapoint. This is Libby Page's first book, so I'm hopeful that more will follow.

I don’t like swimming but if anything were to change my mind it would be this book. Kate is a young journalist who is lost until she is assigned a story about the closure of the local Lido (outdoor swimming pool). She interviews Rosemary, a local who has been swimming at the Lido for 80+years. The interview turns out to be the beginning of a unique friendship and they become fierce allies as they seek to save the Lido.

The romantic scenes were a bit stilted but overall didn’t detract from the story.

This is a heartwarming story of friendship, community and overcoming loneliness. A perfect beach read.

I highly recommend this beautifully written and heartwarming story, focused on Kate and her burgeoning friendship with eighty-six year old Rosemary. Kate feels alone living in London and working for a small newspaper until she is assigned the story of gentrification and the closing of a local lido, or community pool. She meets Rosemary, and as their friendship blossoms, the fight against closing the pool becomes a lifeline for them and the tight knit community. The chapters about Rosemary and her husband, George, are so well written they are almost poetic, describing such a deep love over many years of marriage. I loved this book, and will remember it long after reading the last page.

Loved this book for the complex character development and the beautiful display of friendship and how it can blossom at any age.

This was a fair, interesting read. Not much new with the plot, younger/older person gets together and each inspire the other and helps them grow. But this was beautiful writing which helps propell will book from a 2 star to a 4 star for me.

I am similar to someone else on Goodreads. This book really reminds me of the song "Bridge Over Troubled Water".

Great writing Ms. Page.

A fun and entertaining read about caring for the places and people that matter and about finding out who your friends really are. A young woman, Kate, moves to just outside the big city to follow her dream of becoming a journalist. She lands a job with a small paper doing personal interest stories. However, she finds it difficult to make friends and never really feels at home in her new town. The local Lido, outside pool is possibly going to be sold. Kate meets Rosemary who has lived in the town all her life and who has wonderful memories of what the Lido has meant to her all these years. Kate and Rosemary become friends and allies as they try to save the Lido. Along the way, Kate learns to make new friends and appreciate what she has. Wonderful characters and backstories.

I enjoyed reading this heartwarming story about the development of a friendship between a young woman overcoming her anxiety and a older, widowed woman while trying to save a neighborhood pool. I did find it very predictable at times, but was still glad that I had read it.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC. An incredibly sweet read about friendship and community. As a swimmer I could definitely relate to the calm found underwater.

This started off kind of slow, and honestly I had forgotten what it was about. Still, I continued reading, and it was just adorable! Really cute and super emotional - not really something I would typically read, but I really did appreciate the relationships and friendships throughout the story. A cute contemporary read, not really focused too much on romance, more on the concept of fighting for something you believe in, building relationships on the way, and battling the loneliness that comes with new places and new people. An enjoyable, quick read!

There have only been a few books in my life that I could say were perfection but this is one of them. The Lido is a book that will stick with me for a long time. It is my favorite type a book. A book about people, people who together are together, people who are a bit quirky in their own special way, and about community.

There is not one single thing I would change about this book. It was a book that I didn't want to end but didn't want to put down.

Libby Page is an exquisite beautiful writer. Some of my favorite sentences and quotes are as follows:

"...there was a breeze arguing with the trees".

"...before she caught the infection of self-consciousness".

"In the silence, loneliness is like a third person between them. They nod their heads to it, acknowledging it is there but never calling it by its name."

I received an ARC from NetGalley. All thoughts & opinions are my own.

Thankyou yo netgalley for accepting my request.
The lido is a beautifully weitten book.
An easy read but a memorable one.
A lovely story of love and friendship and how we can all come together at difficult times,
How age is just a number and you can meet friends at any time of your life.

When your eyes are glassy and your nose is dripping and your heart is full - you know you just finished a good book.

I honestly don't know what drew me into this book? The drawn cover with cheery blue waters and skies? The description? Or the fact that this book is marketed in the likes of A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman? Probably all of them combined - and boy am I happy that I picked it up.

Despite picking it up because it was similar to A man Called Ove I was astonished at just how similar the two books actually were.

There was an elderly grieving person, there was an unlikely friendship, infertility, heartwarming romance, a wedding, a gay couple and a strong community. Check, check, check. This is honestly my only grief with this book - it was just way too similar.

I especially liked the anxiety representation in this novel - it was real and relatable and it brought a great dimension to the story. I also think that I am a sucker for unlikely friendships and this book has got one of the best ones.

But I am even a bigger sucker for a tangible, soft and oh so romantic love story. Rosemary and George's love was so real I could feel it pouring over the pages. Their relationship was the most beautiful thing I've ever read about in a book. I adored them and I aspired to be like them - they were so unapologetically in love and it showed in everything they did.

I cannot wait for July so this book gets published and I could post some quotes from it - I highlighted a lot of them! There were some true gems there. I definitely recommend this book, especially because the story is about a lido (an outdoor pool) and it's almost summer time - you won't find a more perfect book! Also, get our your swimsuits out because this book WILL make you want to swim.

Big thanks to Simon & Shuster and NetGalley for a complementary arc copy provided for a review. All opinions are my own, honest and come from the heart.

First of all... Thank you for the opportunity to read this wonderful book.
The Lido is a lovely story.. with relatable characters. The plot was surprisingly unexpected... A new multigenerational friendship to remind me the importance of friendship... This book is sweet and easygoing... I loved the genuine way of the author's writing. .. It made me laugh and cry.. but I ended with a feeling of joy and happiness. I definitely recommend it!

Kate Matthews moves to Brixton to take up a journalist position with a local paper. But life is different to what she imagined it to be. She’s anxious and lonely with only work and microwave dinners featuring in her life. Being asked to write a story on the closing of the local Lido (swimming pool) changes her life, when she meets 87 year old Rosemary, whose life has revolved around the Lido.
This was just a beautiful, gentle story about finding yourself and a place in the community. The characters were very vivid and I could easily imagine every one of them. Set in the present day, the community comes together to fight the closure of the pool but there are chapters interspersed with Rosemary’s story over the years and why the pool is so special to her.
I also enjoyed Kate’s growth throughout the story as she started to believe in herself.
A very satisfying read.
Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for an ARC to read.

4.5 Stars

"When you're weary, feeling small
When tears are in your eyes, I'll dry them all (all)
I'm on your side, oh, when times get rough
And friends just can't be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down"
-- Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon & Garfunkel, Songwriters: Paul Simon

At eighty-six years old, Rosemary has lived in the Brixton neighborhood of London her whole life, a bustling neighborhood that brings to mind a scene of Notting Hill with a small, quaint bookstore, amid a colourful array of street vendors selling everything from flowers to coffee. The shop owners and vendors know Rosemary by her name, but she is best known at the Lido, where she not only learned to swim, as a very young child during the war, but where she has gone her whole life since.

When she met the man who was to be her husband it was there that they met, and it was where she and George went every day of their lives together. But George is gone now, and her morning swims at the Lido are even more precious to Rosemary, it’s where she can still picture him, remember their time together. Relive the memories. It’s where they had their first kiss. It’s where they fell in love. But there are other memories of this place, as well. It is the place where the neighbors gathered after a bomb fell on the park just clear of the Lido, and nearby Dulwich Road that ran along one side of the park. Eighty-six years of memories and all the best ones were from here.

Outside the park, places are beginning to change. Once upon a time, she knew the names of everyone, every shop, and every shop owner. Where the grocery once stood, there is now a bar. Even the library where she used to work is now closed.

Kate Matthews is relatively new to Brixton, a young woman in her mid-twenties who has no friends, who is acutely depressed, prone to panic attacks, and has sister she rarely speaks to. She dreams, dreamed, of becoming a writer and is working as a journalist, but, so far, she has only covered relatively insignificant stories. She’s lonely, desperate for a story she can believe in, some way she can make a difference. She can’t even remember what happiness feels like, anymore, or what it would feel like to meet someone else who might understand how hard it is to get up and face each day.

Everything begins to change the day that Kate is given a job covering a story about the lido, tossing a leaflet with “Save our lido” written on the outside. She reads their plea; the council has declared that due to financial worries they are considering a private bid to buy the building from a corporation who wants to turn it into a gym for private members. Finally, a real story; she hopes she can help, make a difference

This is how Kate first meets Rosemary, when she goes to the lido to interview her for the story, and Rosemary agrees providing Kate, who claims she can’t swim, swims in the lido. She will never understand the importance of this place unless she can see it for herself.

This is how they join together, these two women sixty-some years apart in age, to save the lido, Rosemary’s memories, and maybe even Kate, as well.

This is being promoted as similar to Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, and while I loved Ove and love Backman, I would say this is more comparable to Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, as Ove was a rather cantankerous old man, and there is nothing even remotely grouchy about Rosemary, whereas Harold Fry was about a journey that begins as a personal journey, with others joining in, an awakening of the inner spirit to follow our hearts, and to lend support to others. Still, this is really its own story, and it is a wonderful debut story about the gentrification, love, relationships, change, aging, mental health, the power of community, and the almost miraculous power of friendship.


Pub Date: 10 JUL 2018

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Simon & Schuster

I was a skeptic. Comparing a debut to Fredrik Backman--well, that's some lofty praise, and I was kind of prepared to hate it based on that decision alone. (Nothing against S&S's marketing team, really.) But this completely and utterly won me over, and Libby Page should throw more books at me soon because I'll totally read them.

Rosemary! Rosemary. If you thought it impossible to love someone as much as you loved Britt-Marie, think again. Her love story was sweet, sentimental, and sappy as you'd expect, but it wasn't overbearing and I didn't roll my eyes, not even once. Kate was similarly sweet, and felt very well developed--a lot of people I know are currently in her disillusioned state, and it was refreshing to see this expressed with optimism in a novel.

I'm a huge fan of the way that this community was portrayed and the way that development and money was causing it to change--this felt incredibly realistic, and I could see this happening to any small town. I liked the way that the community banded together and the various methods they used to attempt to save the lido. I loved how it demonstrated the importance of having someone to spearhead a campaign.

The web of characters from throughout the neighbourhood was woven delicarely but surely together. I, gasp, managed to actually remember everyone's names because each character had such a distinct role and such a unique personality. I especially loved the way that Kate and her sister interacted and evolved.

Someone please get me another book like this and soon. Highly recommended.

Thanks, Simon & Schuster, for the complimentary review copy!