Hooked on a Feeling

Hooked on a Feeling #1

by Ainslie Paton

From bestselling, groundbreaking author Ainslie Paton comes a groovy romance about changing times, growing up, breaking out and second chances. Set in Sydney in 1975, when pants and collars were wide, hair was big, eyelids were blue and neighbours shared each other’s lives. There’s a sexual revolution going on, but not in Gayle’s life. She’s never felt so old, so unattractive, and so helpless. Your husband asking for a divorce could do that to you. Now she’s the scandalous new neighbour, the single mum, the divorcee, who needs a job but doesn’t know how to balance her own cheque book. And then Steve and Ray arrive in her life, the former with chocolate hair and hurt eyes, the latter with a tomboy daughter and an uptight attitude. Suddenly, being separated doesn’t feel so shameful. This is the story of how Gayle lost her home to find true friends; her marriage to find a new life; and her husband to find love.

Genres: Romance, Contemporary

508 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2014

About the author

Ainslie Paton always wanted to write stories to make people smile, but the need to eat, accumulate books, and have bedclothes to read under was ever present. She sold out, and worked as a flack, a suit, and a creative, ghosting for business leaders, rabble-rousers, and politicians, and making words happen for companies, governments, causes, conditions, high-profile CEOs, low-profile celebs, and the occasional misguided royal. She still does that. She also writes for love and so she can buy shoes, and the good cat food.

Reviews

[✰ Bianca ✰ BJ's Book Blog ✰ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Australia 1975.



Gayle has just left her husband and her safe life in a nice suburb of Sydney. He doesn't love her anymore and he's having a baby with his girlfriend.
So Gayle and her son Dean were graciously allowed by her husband Max to move into a little house on their own.
Remember this is 1975 - so it's not an everyday thing that a single mum moves into the neighbourhood.
Scandalous!!! o.O
Even her parents won't talk to her - they blame her for everything!!

But Gayle quickly finds friends in her new neighbour Hazel - a young teaching-student who's in love/lust with their very hot neighbour Steve.
Steve!!!
Phew - Gayle is totally in lust-at-first-sight.
Which is something completely new for her - she's practically a virgin after being married to Max for eight years.
Then there's Steve's brother Ray - who's the father of Kim - who's the new best friend of Gayle's son Dean.
Ray! ♥ They kind of can't stand each other at the beginning!



this is kind of my idea of a mix between Ray & Steve ☺ I couldn't find a hot 1975 guy!

Lots of new people - lots of new opportunities - maybe a much happier future?

But Gayle's ex Max is still controlling everything - he's the one paying for the house after all - and he's the one who can legally take away Dean if he feels like it!

And the new men in Gayle's life - Steve and Ray - they're not without their own problems either.

The story is told from Gayle's, Ray's, Hazel's & Dean's POVs - that way we can hear everything they think and feel.
How little Dean loves it in this new neighbourhood - he loves his new friend Kim, but he kinda misses his Dad. But Steve and Ray are totally cool too.

Poor Hazel has been in love with war veteran Steve for years. But he's such a (sexy) womanizing idiot!

Ray is fighting to keep his life on track - his PTSD brother, his little girl and the annoying - and hot - new neighbour.

And Gayle. She doesn't really know what she wants. What she could have now that she's a single mom.
She has dreams and wishes but wouldn't it be safer and better for Dean if she wouldn't have left her husband?

WHO WiLL GAYLE END UP WITH???
WiLL THERE BE A HEA???
WiLL THERE BE A CLiFFHANGER???



NOPE..... I'm not telling you ☺



I don't want to spoil anything!!!
_____________________________



I REALLY LOVED THE BOOK!

This was such a beautiful story!
Sydney 1975 - I was a bit worried about that at first. But you don't really notice it that much - ok - there are lots of seventies brands and bands and cars mentioned, and nobody has ever heard of feminism - but I really loved the book.

Such an amazing group of people - Gayle & Dean - Ray & Kim & Steve & Hazel.
And all their lives pretty much start anew when Gayle and her son move into the street.

It was so adorable to watch them struggle and fight and love and have fun....

I felt like I was right there with them - maybe like an old TV-Show or Movie - coloured, but a little bit faded like an old photograph - which doesn't make it any less wonderful - maybe it makes it all even better.
Everything is described so beautifully and vividly. I wanted to move in next door to Steve or Ray - to be the one who could save them and make them happy again!

I think I spent the last third of the book crying - it was soo moving and sad and beautiful!



Was there something I didn't like??
Hm - maybe the moustaches the guys had on their faces! I hate that - but I can't blame Ainslie - it was the seventies - guys did have those back then - I think I will blame Tom Selleck or whoever started that horrible face-hair-idiocy ☺
But don't let the "1975 in Australia"- thing stop you from reading this beautiful Love Story!

HOOKED ON A FEELiNG was such a beautifully romantic, adorable and moving seventies Love Story!
You will fall in love with Ray & Steve & all the others too!!!

[✰ BJ's Book Blog ✰Janeane ✰ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Ainslie Paton for giving the the chance to relive my childhood whilst reading Hooked on a Feeling!

Although maybe not so many thanks for making me feel old!!

Seriously, it was like I was reliving growing up in the suburbs of Sydney.  Be warned non-Aussies that there are quite a few product names and brands mentioned, but they are mainly at the beginning, and I see it as payback for all the American brands and names I always have to read about!!

I loved the story of Gayle, newly separated and trying to make do on her own for the first time ever, along with her son Dean. At first her shame at being dumped by her douche of a husband is palpable. 
But then it is like a switch was flipped.  It is like she finally started to live her life when she moved into the quite suburban street.

The whole neighbourhood seems to come alive when Gayle and Dean move in.  And she does not escape the notice of the single men in the area either.  Ray and Kim, Steve and Hazel didn't know what hit them!

I loved the brothers Ray and Steve, each in their own way.  Steve is a flirtatious, hands on kind of guy, while Ray is more standoffish, brusque, mean kind of guy. Or is he?

So who will get the girl?  Will there be a happy ending?

Nope, not telling.

This is such a different kind of book to the others that Ms Paton has written.  It is beautifully descriptive, heck I could almost hear the waves at the beach, feel the sting of a summer sunburn, hear the cicadas echoing down the street.

It is a sweet, romantic book - even if it did make me cry for a big portion of the last half!  My heart broke for more than one character in this book as their stories came to fruition.  There was so much heartache and trouble for so many of them at different times in the story.

Hey, I know it was the style at the time, but my grandmother always said "don't trust a man with a moustache, he has something to hide".  But boy did these boys rock their pornstachios - I swear all I could picture was 70's porn staches!

Ms Paton has written  a sweet, beautiful book about love and loss in a time that felt so near but so far away - and thankfully not a hippy in sight.  She has not disappointed me in the past, she has not disappointed me with Hooked on a Feeling, and I am sure she will not disappoint me in the future.

 So get groovy baby and read this unreal book!

[Love Reading Romance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gayle's a good little housewife, until her husband cheats and knocks up another woman. Now life is all single mother terror, judgy school nuns and new neighbors. It's the new neighbors who are most under her skin, though - Steve, who's all sex on legs, but seems to be as much into their neighbor Hazel as he is into her, and Ray, the single dad who brings out the worst in Gayle, just as his daughter brings out the devil in her son.

So, where to begin? There are a few storylines and romances happening in this one, but the primary narratives shift around Gayle and Ray, Gayle and Steve and Steve and Hazel, plus the kids.

Gayle is a wonderful main character. To start with she is so unsure of herself, lost in the world and without any idea of how to find her way. But she's no wilting flower. She's a mama bear first and foremost, determined to protect her son and trying to work out her new identity as Single Mother. She wants to make something of herself beyond that role too, as soon as she can work out how.

Initially led astray by Steve's wandering hands, her primary romance is with Ray. I love Ray. His story is as tumultuous as Gayle's, if not more, having lost his wife to depression and suicide. But he's a dedicated father, consumed by single father terror too, and just wanting to do right by his daughter. It's Gayle and Ray's struggle to balance parenting with their own personal needs and desires that pushes these two apart even as it pulls them together. I found this so realistic, relatable and heart wrenching.

So what about Hazel and Steve? I love Hazel. She's as innocent as she is perceptive, but totally weighed down by her love of a complete douche-bag. That's right - I really disliked Steve. A lot of readers are going to get the bad boy shivers for him, but he's not the sort of book boyfriend I fall for. So I was almost hoping him and Hazel wouldn't get their HEA/HFN (I know, I know - SACRILEGE!).

The thing is, Steve is a difficult character to redeem and I just couldn't see it happening in the space of a novel. And yet, Ainslie Paton totally came through with this storyline, but not in the way I expected and definitely not the way I wanted. I guess readers don't always know what's best for them and this was one of those cases. I won't spoil the story for you, but I'll just say a big thanks to the author for giving Steve and Hazel the ending they deserved.

Some of this book is also told from the perspective of Dean, Gayle's son. I was very dubious when his first section began, since I think maintaining a child-tone in an adult book can be really difficult and is often unconvincing (Emma Donoghue's Room being a brilliant exception). However, Dean's sections were convincing and gave some really nice insights into the story that I enjoyed, though I'm not 100% sure they were necessary.

Similarly, the main narrative occasionally has an odd structure, with some of the major moments being recalled by characters (including a proposal scene), rather than taking place on the page as present incidents. Weirdly, this didn't bother me as much as I feel like it should have. Somehow it worked, but it was something that I couldn't help noticing and I wonder if it might have been less distracting to have less of a flash back style narrative. I'm not sure.

It was the 70s setting of this novel that had me picking it up in the first place and this story turned out to be such a great blast from the past. Ainslie Paton totally brings the 70s Aussie vibe to life and I was mesmerized. If the characters don't pull you in (which I find hard to believe), the setting will. It is very Aussie, so I have to admit that I'm not sure how international readers will read it, but I reckon a holiday to 70s Sydney is a good trip for anyone. I loved the Brady Bunch references, the 5c lemonade, Hazel's references to molls and especially CRACKER NIGHT!!

The beauty of this book, though, comes from the way it manages to point out the timelessness of the characters' issues and journeys. Despite being set in the 70s, so much about this story is completely here and now. While we like to think we're all liberated post feminist women, the experiences of Gayle, Hazel, and even Ray's late wife Pam, are scarily familiar, and the current reality for many women is made all the more intense by the distance of this story's setting. It's wonderful and heartbreaking.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention the sex. OMG. Let me just leave you with this quote:

"I’m going to lick you like you licked up that batter."

Oh. My.

[Fiona Marsden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know what it is about Ainslie Paton's writing but even though I would normally say this is not my kind of book, it still manages to suck me in. I was curious about this one because it was set in 1975. I turned 14 at the end of that year so I remember it well. I remember the stubby shorts, the terry towelling outfits. The only thing I was surprised not to see was a safari suit. My dad wore one of those for most of the 70's.

There are two romances and a bit in this story but part of the joy (or angst) is not knowing who is going to end up with who.

Our main heroine, Gayle (I went to school with numerous combinations of that name) is a young women with a child who has just separated from her husband due to his infidelity (among other things). Her seven year old son Dean is the centre of her world and in 1975 starting out as a single mother was a far bigger deal than it is forty years later. Married out of school she has never worked.(yes there are feminist undertones but only in relation to the storyline)

On her first day in her new neighbourhood Gayle meets Steve and Ray and Ray's daughter Kim who is the same age as Dean. She also meets Hazel, a teacher trainee visiting her parents and younger brother Greg. We get to meet the whole neighbourhood as time goes by, including Susan who is the neighbourhood babysitter at sixteen. It's all terribly familiar.

Despite the cast of thousands, it is a very intimate story centred around Dean and Kim's friendship and the to and fro of the adults around them. Steve is a Vietnam vet, his brother is a widower and even between these two brothers there are secrets and tensions that impact on the story. Hazel has her part to play and of course there is Max, Gayle's ex who still has a role in her life because of Dean.

This is not a standard romance, even though there are love stories contained within. It is a time capsule of a period in Australian suburbia that will evoke nostalgia for those of my generation and above. It is a complex story about very real people dealing with real issues with the odd effect of looking through a lens slightly distorted by the setting in 1975.

[Susan Scribner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a bit of a departure for Ainslie Paton from her contemporary romances, as it takes place in 1976 and has a strong secondary romance, along with a heroine who starts off with one guy and ends up with another. I could identify with the period details (even though I grew up in America, not Australia) - the songs, the disco, the clothes, the mustaches. And Paton reminds us of how difficult life could be for women of that era, especially divorced ones, who were frequently considered loose women just by virtue of their status. The women's liberation movement had just begin to make itself felt, but women still had a tough time finding jobs and getting decent wages for their work.

The historical aspect is interesting (ouch - when did my childhood become history?) but at heart this is still a love story, with two engaging couples and lots of angst, especially on the part of the male characters, and several scorching sex scenes. I've gotten used to reading contemporary romances with sexually experienced heroines , but setting this book in 1976 allows Paton to go back to the old trope of the almost-virgin heroine who thinks she's frigid. Interestingly, it's not even the hero who first awakens her, but he sure finishes the job. In the process, the heroine learns the difference between someone who looks as her "like she was a delicious daily special, something to devour and digest" and someone who looks at her "as though she was altering his view of the world and his place in it." Wow!

Ainslie's blog indicates that she wrote Hooked on a Feeling as an exercise to see if she could do something different. I'm glad to say that the experiment was very successful. Her upcoming releases all look like contemporary romances, but if she wants to go back to the era of disco balls and pornstaches I'll be glad to trip back down memory lane with her.

[Sharryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 out of 5 stars

I felt like I was reliving 1975 whilst reading this book. I was in my later teens at the time and it was the year I got my first full time job, passed my driving test and bought my first car. No it was not a Sandman panel van! Thankyou to Ainslie for her wonderful take on the era.

I will admit there was a lot of Aussieness in this book and I’m not sure non Australian readers will understand a lot of it. But if you are an Aussie you will love the references to Sunnyboys, fish fingers, Rice-a-Riso, Vegemite toast, cracker night, dragstar bikes and of course the car all teen boys wanted, the Sandman panel van.

The characters came across as real people. Gayle recently separated and trying to come to terms with being a single mother. Honestly, I think she was much better off without her idiot husband.

Gayle and her son Dean move into a house in a new suburb across the road from Steve and Ray who are brothers. Steve is a returned serviceman who has served two tours in Vietnam and has a lot of devils he is dealing with. His brother Ray is the responsible one running his own business and looking after his daughter Kim.

There are a number of other characters in the book, neighbours from the same street whose lives interact with Gayle, Steve and Ray. Hazel is a delight.

So who ends up with who? You will have to read this wonderful book to find out and I guarantee you will love it. No spoilers here.

I received a copy of this book from Escape Publishing through Netgalley for an honest review.

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARC received via Netgalley in exchange of an honest review

5 sparkling retro Stars

this book is in the favorite book I read.
It was so naturally lovely cute and realistic.
The era felt close and far away. I wasn't born but it was set in the 70s, somewhere I wasn't hoping for Hippy, I have nothing against hippy, it just I can't really grab the lifestyle.
With this book, it wasn't only about Gayle, a young but age woman, lost and ashame of her situation. Ashame not really but her situation wasn't that welcome. So she learnt to be alone but firstly being herself having the opportunity to be other than the mother and the wife not like when she was with her husband. she didn't havd the opportunity to have that eyes for something and somewhere else and there she got that but also having a real love give and take.
this book wasn't only about her...
Steve, Ray, dean, kim and someone else.
Every character were a part of the story. A life.
Everyone got to get the chance, the opportunity to grow or to step on.
I really don't want to say more about the characters because it would spoil the story.
As for the children, it was very sweet and warm to tbe the heart.
And this story got its cliffhanger or big surprise too, I wasn't disappointed at all. what a great book even the new tv concept seemed so far away and also facial hair not my think. But the feeling and concept don't age.

[Cat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was quite anticipating reading this; i love australian fiction. Bit disappointed in this, though.....the story was good....however, there were rather a lot of longwinded sex scenes which kind of got rather ho-hum......
one...yeah..ok.....two even....but in the end i just skimmed through them feeling vaguely annoyed. if i wanted to read erotic fiction, then i would read 50 shades of whatever.
i really wish the author had just told the story...put in a couple of sex bits (it's set in the 70's after all!) and be done with it.....
now she's made me sound like a prude! which i'm not...honest i'm not.....dang you Ainslie!
:-)

[Kylie H · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the story line but found the characters a bit corny and a little too perfect. I also found the constant references to 70's songs quite irritating as it was unnecessary, it was clear the story was set in the 70's and didn't need a song catalogue to authenticate it. The story also ended a bit too abruptly for my liking. Clearly others have really enjoyed this, it was a good story but not great.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is quite different to the two previous books I have read by Ainslie Paton, so it took me a little while to adjust. Was it great reading? You bet. Loved the characters and the situations they were in, I wasn't sure how it was all going to end up - but I was every bit as satisfied with how things played out, as were Kim and Dean (the kids!)

[Roz ~ My Written Romance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy sh*tballs! I...love...this...book!