Everything Happens For A Reason by Katie Allen

Good Morning and Yay it’s June! Today I bring to you a review for Everything Happens For A Reason by Katie Allen. Thank you Katie and Anne at Random Things Tours for giving me this opportunity.

Blurb

Mum-to-be Rachel did everything right, but it all went wrong. Her son, Luke, was stillborn and she finds herself on maternity leave without a baby, trying to make sense of her loss.

When a misguided well-wisher tells her that ‘everything happens for a reason’, she becomes obsessed with finding that reason, driven by grief and convinced that she is somehow to blame. She
remembers that on the day she discovered her pregnancy, she’d stopped a man from jumping in front of a train, and she’s now certain that saving his life cost her the life of her son.

Desperate to find him, she enlists an unlikely ally in Lola, an Underground worker, and Lola’s seven-year-old daughter, and eventually tracks him down, with completely unexpected results…

Review

I wasn’t sure what to expect by this book. It isn’t my usual genre but with the topic being something personal to myself I really wanted to read it.

The book is set out like diary entries, in which the main character emails herself. I really like how this was done and it didn’t hold back from the emotion and pain which she felt as well as the desperation to clutch on to anything that can explain the devastation which she has experienced.

There were moments of joy, happiness, amusement and moments of darkness, anger and grief.

The book was extremely well written and it had me laughing and crying at parts throughout it.

Obviously the topic won’t be for everyone but it really is a book not to be missed. Poignant, realistic and bittersweet, an absolute marvel.

About The Author

Everything Happens for a Reason is Katie’s first novel. She used to be a journalist and columnist at the Guardian and Observer, and started her career as a Reuters correspondent in Berlin and London. The events in Everything Happens for a Reason are fiction, but the premise is loosely autobiographical. Katie’s son, Finn, was stillborn in 2010, and her character ’s experience of grief and being on maternity leave without a baby is based on her own. And yes, someone did say to her ‘Everything happens for a reason’. 

Katie grew up in Warwickshire and now lives in South London with her husband, children, dog, cat and stick insects. When she’s not writing or walking children and dogs, Katie loves baking, playing the piano, reading news and wishing she had written other people’s brilliant novels.

Thanks for reading

Emma-Louise x