The Flat Share by Beth O'Leary - Book Review

 

I’ve been hearing great things about this novel for many months, finally one day I bought the book. After reading this novel, I must agree one hundred and ten percent with all of those reviews about how great this novel is.  It is surprising to know that this is O’Leary’s debut novel, especially on how well it’s been written. The writing and how she holds the reader's attention makes it seem like she has been publishing novels for over twenty years. She also took risks on how to present the writing in this novel; carry on reading and you’ll find out what I mean about this. 

Straight away from the book cover, you get a gist of what the book is about. Right at the bottom, it says ‘Tiffy & Leon share a bed. Tiffy & Leon have never met…’ Two people sharing not only a flat, but a bed, and yet never met one another; how does that work?  Tiffy is moving on, leaving her ex’s, Justin, place. He has a new girlfriend, therefore means Tiffy wants to leave the flat. The difficult part of moving for Tiffy is how expensive it is in London.   Leon is letting his room (not flat, but room) for £350 a month. The reason for this is that he needs money to pay for his lawyer who is trying to get Leon’s brother, Richie, out of prison. Who’s been wrongly accused of a crime he did not do.  The rules are simple. Tiffy will have the bed in the evening and weekend, while Leon is at work as a nurse, or at his girlfriend’s. While Leon will have the bed during the day when Tiffy is at work as an editor.  It all works smoothly. The only thing is they’ve never met, but that doesn’t stop them from getting to know one another. They leave post-it notes for each other. Until one day they meet﹘I won’t tell you how, but it’s really funny.  Their friendship blossomed over the eight months. Of course, as this novel is in the romance genre, the pair end up with each other. I won’t tell you how, instead, you’ll have to read the book to find out what happens between Leon and his girlfriend. And if Tiffy’s ex is really out of the picture. 

There are a few things that I really enjoyed about this novel. The first thing is the risk that O’Leary took, she would chapter swap from Tiffy to Leon, in first person. It’s difficult to do this because you need to write in different voices for each chapter, and O’Leary did this. You could read a chapter and straight away tell if we were reading from the point of view of Leon or Tiffy. A way O’Leary did this was using different dialogue techniques. For Tiffy, when characters are having different conversations with one another, it would look like this ‘...’ However, for Leon, it looked more like a script, it was set up like this, Me:... Tiffy:... As a reader, if you had to stop in the middle of the chapter, you could go back to that page, see how the dialogue is presented and you'll know whose mind we are in.  Taking a risk like this means the storylines for Tiffy and Leon both had to be strong, to make sure that the reader does not skip or skim-read the chapters from Leon’s point of view, or Tiffy’s chapters. I am happy to admit that they both had strong storylines that interlinked perfectly. With Leon’s story, he was trying to do everything to help his brother. While with Tiffy’s storyline, we show her growing from her old relationship with Justin and learn what kind of relationship she was stuck in when being with him.  I also liked at the end, when everything came back together, it all made sense. There wasn’t a moment when I thought ‘Oh, I don’t believe that.’ O’Leary wrote a realistic story of something that seems like it would never happen in real life ﹘ sharing a bed with a stranger ﹘ and doing that is amazing. 

It’s not that there were elements I didn’t like about this novel, but more that I wished there was more romance between Tiffy and Leon. As a romance, the two main characters have to end up with each other, otherwise, it can’t be called a romance novel. Therefore it was always going to happen that Tiffy and Leon will end up with one another. However, it would have been nice to see more romance. Yeah, they went to Brighton together, but it was mainly for Leon’s storyline. They both have big storylines, and therefore, the romance was brushed to the side. 

Overall, I definitely want to buy more of Beth O’Leary books. In my opinion, she knows how to make a story flow, and hook a reader. I do believe that Beth O’Leary could be another author for me.