The Happiest Little Town in Aussie Readers

Sep 03, 2022 Brenda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022-release, contemporary-fiction, 3500-2022, reviewing-by-request, aussie-authors, sent-by-publisher, own-read, arc

Kate's dream of finishing the van she was renovating and heading off solo around Australia were put abruptly on hold when a stranger knocked on her door in the small town of Burralea. Inside his car was a thirteen year old girl, Tilly, whose mother had recently died and Kate had been named as guardian in the mother's will. Tilly had arrived from Cairns, leaving everything she'd known, all her friends and school mates behind, to live with a complete stranger who she knew didn't want her.

The Burra ...more

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Aug 11, 2022 Helen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: review-copy-from-publisher

When I pick up a Barbara Hannay story I know I am going to be welcomed into a story that brings characters to life and that I will be friends with them, that I will be cheering them on and feeling every emotion there is to feel and this one does just that, I loved meeting Olivia, Kate and Tilly and the wonderful characters who live in Burralea on the Atherton Tablelands in far North Queensland, come along and meet them as well.

Thirteen year old Tilly has just lost her Mum and she now finds herse When I pick up a Barbara Hannay story I know I am going to be welcomed into a story that brings characters to life and that I will be friends with them, that I will be cheering them on and feeling every emotion there is to feel and this one does just that, I loved meeting Olivia, Kate and Tilly and the wonderful characters who live in Burralea on the Atherton Tablelands in far North Queensland, come along and meet them as well.

Thirteen year old Tilly has just lost her Mum and she now finds herself being pulled away from her friends in Cairns to live with someone she has never met, this stranger is now going to be her guardian, can life get any worse for Tilly?

Kate has moved away from the place she has known forever to Burralea where no one knows her because her ex-husband has caused so much pain for her but Kate is determined to make a better life for herself she has bought a van and is doing it up so as she can take off and go where she fancies.

Olivia is an actress but the years are passing and she has lived in Burralea for a long time now and has had many roles with the local theatre group, these days she lives a quiet life having left the lights behind her, but when she has to give up her role in the new play she is not happy at all.

Tilly arrives on Kate’s doorstep and both are uncertain about the future and Tilly has just left everything she knows behind and Kate’s plans are going to have to change. When Tilly is encouraged to join the Burralea amateur theatre group this brings the three of them together and a wonderful friendship grows with each of them opening up about their pasts and looking towards the future. Add in some wonderful local characters a drama just before opening night and people from the past arriving and this makes this a story not to be missed.

I loved this one from start to finish I felt all the emotions that were there, there were happy tears and sad ones but above all else there were lots of smiles and cheers, I do highly recommend this story, many thanks Barbara Hannay for another fabulous story that will stay with me for a long time to come.

My thanks to Penguin Books AU for my copy to read and review.
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Jul 22, 2022 Cathleen Ross rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a story about three protagonists that don't think they can be happy again. Kate Sheridan has finally managed to get her life in order, she's raised her kids and it's her time. The next moment a teenager, the produce of Kate's ex husband and another woman, is dumped on her.
Tilly, the teenager who is dumped on Kate, never thinks she'll be happy again. She doesn't know her father, her mother has just died and Tilly misses Cairns and her best friend, desperately. Worse, she's comes to live i ...more

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Aug 05, 2022 Bree T rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: arc, rural-lit

A new Barbara Hannay book is always cause to celebrate. They’re such comfort reads for me, feel good stories with wonderful characters and set in places that I wished I lived. This one is really no exception.

Primarily the story centres around three people: 14yo Tilly who was orphaned after her mother died recently. She’s never met her father and her mother’s boyfriend, while he cares for her, feels that he is not an appropriate guardian and would never be seen as such by authority figures anyway A new Barbara Hannay book is always cause to celebrate. They’re such comfort reads for me, feel good stories with wonderful characters and set in places that I wished I lived. This one is really no exception.

Primarily the story centres around three people: 14yo Tilly who was orphaned after her mother died recently. She’s never met her father and her mother’s boyfriend, while he cares for her, feels that he is not an appropriate guardian and would never be seen as such by authority figures anyway. Then there’s Kate, who is divorced, in her 50s with her own children grown and living their own lives. She’s renting a place in a town in the Northern Tablelands of Queensland as a base while she fits out a former tradie van so that she can go travelling around the country. And then there’s Olivia, a 70-something actress who is forced to confront her own mortality and future after injuring herself in rehearsals for a local play. The arrival of Tilly into the area turns everything Kate had planned for her future on its head and at first Olivia isn’t sure why it’s been suggested she help Tilly in terms of acting. What could she and a young teenage girl hope to get out of a friendship? But all of the women are going to be surprised.

I have to admit, I had a few feelings of trepidation after starting this because I do not feel what happened to Kate was at all fair – nor should it be legal. However I couldn’t find anything concrete that suggested it wasn’t! So it appears that while not ideal….it’s something that could actually happen. Whilst I see why Tilly’s mother made the choice she did, probably believing that it wouldn’t ever need to come to fruition, I do still feel that it wasn’t a fair choice, for anyone concerned, even if it probably did end up being the best choice she could’ve made at the time.

The circumstances in which Kate and Tilly come into each other’s lives definitely made me sympathetic to the both of them. Tilly is at such an impressionable age (she’s the same age as my eldest son who turns 14 next week) and she’s had her entire life as she knew it, completely turned upside down. It’s mostly been her and her mother her whole life and it seems like they had an incredibly wonderful and close relationship. Now her mother is gone and she’s had to go and live somewhere else with someone she didn’t know existed beforehand in a completely different town where she has no friends. And for Kate? She’s done with raising her children in a hands-on fashion. She has her own plans for the future and definitely didn’t count on becoming a guardian.

Tilly’s fear and uncertainty, her grief all shone through the pages. I felt like this really nailed a teen who has been through so much and was feeling lost and like she had nowhere she fit in. She just desperately needs a bit of stability and some inclusion and although she and Kate get off to a rough start, eventually the two of them muddle through it and the introduction of Tilly to the local theatre group also helps enormously as it gives Tilly a feeling of belonging and something that she is passionate about. Her friendship with Olivia becomes something precious too, like a surrogate grandmother-granddaughter relationship which benefits them both as neither of them have those relations.

I loved this whole town and the other residents that we got to meet. I’d love if we got to revisit this town in a future book, maybe revisit Tilly too, as she gets older. I think there’s a lot of potential to explore more about it, if the author ever wanted to do that. I loved the budding romance for Kate and the ways in which we got to know Olivia and understand the things that had happened in her past. And why the three of them ended up becoming quite close, something that you know will continue to develop after the end of the story that forms this book. I loved Kate’s ‘van life’ component (makes me wonder if Barbara Hannay watched some of the same people on YouTube that I do, as I started watching a lot of this sort of thing in lockdown!)

This was everything I expected and now I eagerly await the next release.

***A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of an honest review*** ...more

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Aug 30, 2022 Tien rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: australia, australian-author, contemporary, womens-lit, for-review, by-the-month-22

Isn't it just the cutest book cover!? And that title, I feel that I'm guaranteed an easy, light-hearted, and uplifting read which my mood tells me I need these days. It did not disappoint; The Happiest Little Town certainly made me happy.

I find it always touching when 3 generations of women are brought together. I love to see the effect they have on each other. In this novel, the mix of Olivia's wisdom, Kate's generosity, and Tilly's grief made a lovely cocktail of lasting friendship. I am in Ka ...more

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Oct 13, 2022 Rina rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The cover of this book gave me an immediate heartwarming feeling, and the story turned out to be the exact kind of book I needed at the time.

Fourteen-year-old Tilly was forced to leave her life behind when her mother died and she was sent to live in Far North Queensland, far away from everything she had known. Moving on from a failed marriage, Kate was determined to tour around Australia in a van that she renovated herself. The fresh start of her new life was so close within reach when an unexpe ...more

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