Review & Guest Post : From Notting Hill with Love…Actually by …

I received a copy of From Knotting Hill with Love…Actually in exchange for an honest review.
This was the first I have read from Ali McNamara, and I was really excited for it. Everything about it just screamed classic chick lit, and it left me with a smile at the end. Main character and movie fanatic Scarlett O’Brien has an obsession with movies. She loves dreaming about the glamorous and romantic lives some of her favorite leading ladies have had. There is a tiny problem though – her life is quite unexciting and unglamorous. When Scarlett gets the opportunity to house-sit in none other than Knotting Hill, she jumps at the chance. Finally, a way to show her father and boring fiancé that life really can imitate art. But her romantic comedy plans turn out decidedly more complicated than Scarlett ever expected. Will she get her happy ending?
This is a really fun chick lit book, and I immensely enjoyed it. Scarlett is such a fab heroine, a bit mixed-up and clueless but such an optimist you have no choice but to love her. I enjoyed her quite complicated love life, and was really on the end of chair when I was reading the last few chapters. The supporting cast mixed in seamlessly and the minor plot points were interesting and kept the story moving along. One for chick lit lovers to check out!
[Rating: 4]

Big thanks to Ali McNamara for sharing this guest post!

I think one of the most commonly asked questions of novelists is “Where do you get your ideas from?’
And it’s one of the hardest to answer, because usually they spring out of nowhere. What sometimes seems like a great idea when you first think of it, might never actually lead anywhere. Sometimes you don’t even know you’ve had an idea until it keeps banging away in your mind trying to tell you it needs to escape and become something else. And sometimes an idea hits you so hard in the face you feel like you’ve been hit by a clown throwing ‘idea’ shaped custard pies.

‘From Notting Hill with Love…Actually’ was the second of those three. It came to me when I was watching one of those countdowns on one of the music channels on TV – ‘50 greatest movie theme tunes.’
As each of the songs came on to the screen I realised the movies were so well known I knew exactly what was going on in each plot even without dialogue, and I thought wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could get all those great movies into one story, and that’s how the idea began to slowly take shape.
‘Breakfast at Darcy’s’ my second novel was the latter of three. One year I was on holiday with my husband. In a momentary fit of insanity I’d agreed it would be a good idea to take a touring holiday around Ireland in a motorhome, I have no idea why now to this day, I’m much more your luxury hotel sort of holiday-maker. The ‘luxury’ motorhome we hired was not quite the home-from-home we were promised over the Internet, I actually christened it the ‘dustbin on wheels’ it was so bad. But however as we trundled about Ireland, one night when we parked up amongst spectacular scenery in County Kerry, directly opposite the island of Great Blasket, a casual chat about the beauty and remoteness of the island led to one of those random conversations about how you might go about trying to live on an island as isolated as that, and the seed of an idea was immediately planted in my brain for a new novel based around such an island.
So you could say the idea for ‘Breakfast at Darcy’s’ pretty much came from the trashcan!
My third novel is a sequel to my first; it just felt like I had more to tell about the characters and their lives. And my fourth, which I’m writing now, is a story I’ve wanted to write for sometime. It has a music theme this time – with a twist!

Ali McNamara
www.alimcnamara.co.uk
Twitter @AliMcNamara