The Invitation

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Now they are reaching the top of the staircase where the final door stands open to reveal a seething crowd. I could not relate to her and it was unbelievable to me that Hal was so taken by this married, aloof, cold, wimp of a woman.

On the yacht, he will at last find his Stella—now on the arm of her nasty American husband, the film’s major backer. Shows Foley's early signs of writing best sellers, but it also shows her marked improvement and innate ability to focus on character development. This is more a period piece and locale feel study with some deep characterizations rather than a mystery or criminal aspect. He likes her because she's beautiful and mysterious and fragile and broken, and because she's the only one he can share his big secret with.Women were either the elite, the beautiful, and/or the quiet suffering ones amongst the rich and famous.

I grew annoyed and bored to get the point I did not even slip to the end to see how this drab “love affair” that makes zero sense ends. The blurbs on the jacket describe this book as "luminous", and I guess that is true, if luminous means boring.This is the first book i've read by Lucy Foley and will definitely be looking to read more from her as I found her style of writing so evocative and appealing. To his dismay, the mysterious girl disappears as quickly as she swept in, and Hal’s life as a journalist falls back into its familiar routine. I was gripped from the beginning- a book which held my attention as a result of good characterisation, intense plot, superb style and wonderful sense of place. You’ll find those rich folks who visit remote estates and splash money around and so the author found it relevant to create a story in that line.

I thought I was going to love this book, with its laudatory blurbs by Elin Hildebrand, Beatriz Williams, and Lucinda Riley on the back cover. He has lost weight, too, since he last wore it, thanks to his poor diet of coffee and the occasional sandwich.This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. There is a twist towards the end which I didn’t see coming and helped move the book in a completely different direction to the one i was expecting. There are also beautiful and tragic events and people, where you get a sense of both privilege and wanting…and yearning.

Reading The Invitation was another experience of time travel such as I’d enjoyed with Anton DiSclafani’s The After Party. All the characters go on a personal journey throughout the book and it was lovely to see how much they had changed towards the end. The Invitation is an early novel written by Lucy Foley, an author whose thrillers and family dramas have entertained me many times the last two years. This ‘romance’ develops ludicrously fast with no apparent foundations: the couple fail to connect on any sort of psychological level, having only the quintessential emotional baggage in common.In fact, many of the characters lacked depth with only Stella being given flashbacks (interesting why only her past was deemed necessary). Her antics often had me laughing out loud at times, especially when it wasn’t at first clear what she was up to and her devious schemes were gradually revealed. Set mainly around the Italian Riviera, this is a stunning story of romance, secret pasts, glamour and chance meetings. The gown, the centuries-old bricks, the flames of the torches: modern Rome suddenly feels a long way away. It’s a bright awakening for Hal, he believes he’s found the love of his life – his Stella, his star.