Should I Tell You? - Jill Mansell

Author: Jill Mansell

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Rating: 3.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A fairly complex saga of relationships, mostly of the romantic kind but also including parental and friend connections. As predictable as the genre suggests, but there are a few surprises along the way. A nice light read.

Story Synopsis:

Lachlan is a successful chef and a serial womaniser. Raffaele is a well-known hair dresser who has recently broken up with his dream girlfriend Vee. Amber, a creative stained glass artist, is secretly in love with her best friend but she can’t tell him so for fear of jeopardising their friendship. What ties these three together is not just that they are friends but also that they were raised in the same home as foster children under the loving care of Teddy and May. Now a crisis has brought them together again. May had passed away last year and Teddy seems to have found love in the arms of young, beautiful and too-perfect-to-be-true Olga. How do the trio save their foster dad from the arms of an opportunist while also solving their own personal entanglements?

Jill Mansell is known for her light, easy-on-the-mind-and-heart books. But this book goes overboard on the number of main and somewhat-main characters. If you are the kind to get flustered at too many characters, you better be ready with a notepad (physical or virtual) while reading this book. The main characters are Lachlan, Raffaele and Amber, but the narrative doesn’t focus only on these three. Raffaele’s ex Vee; Lachlan’s patron Peggy, her son Benjie and his love interests; Teddy and Olga; and a few secondary characters such as Dom and Jo also get their fair share of spotlight.

Furthermore, there are about 8 couples who come together or grow apart during the course of the story. (These are just the ones who have a dedicated track in the plot – I have ignored the minor ones.) So you need to remember not just who is who but also who is/was with whom. A go-with-the-flow approach works but you will still end up confused at times. The book would have functioned better if a couple of the subtracks had been taken out. I think it became too ambitious and as a result, focussed more on breadth than depth for its characters.

The story is very easy on the head though. As with almost all stories in this genre, it is fairly predictable. All the stock characters are present – the womaniser, the woman pining in secret for her best friend’s heart, the one still struggling over a bad breakup, the opportunist beauty,… Almost all tracks except for one or two go as expected. Then again, people read this genre more for emotions than for surprises; you get both in this book, that’s a plus.

My favourite part of the book was the focus it gave to foster relationships. The bond between a foster parent and a child, and the feeling of protectiveness that comes with this connection, are nicely depicted. Romance is still the key emotion explored but the foster relationships come a nice second.

Overall, a pretty decent book. Not a mind-blowing experience but definitely not the worst I have read. It has its share of nice and unexpected moments amid the clichés. But I have read a couple of Jill Mansell’s other works and this ranks the least interesting of them all.

If you know this genre, you know what you are going into. It’s a nice, feel-good entertainer that will serve well as a palate cleanser in between intense reads. A one-time read to try without expecting long-term impact.

My thanks to Sourcebooks Casablanca and NetGalley for the DRC of “Should I Tell You?” This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.