Preloved: A sparklingly witty and relatable debut novel

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One of these chores is to dispose of the engagement ring that she has been holding on to since the abrupt ending of the relationship. It is through the clock that we learn Nicolas’s true character (which isn’t overly pleasant, we have been giving him the benefit of the doubt until this point). She’s been isolating herself almost since the day she told her fiance that their relationship was over 5 years ago.

Preloved by Lauren Bravo - Fantastic Fiction Preloved by Lauren Bravo - Fantastic Fiction

You can learn a lot about people and the things they give away, hobbies that never happened and relationships that slowly faded. Some see them as a place to offload their junk that has been cluttering their house for years, to cleanse themselves of their past life in hopes that others will find need from their unwanted possessions. She vows to begin living her life fully, reconnect with her friends and family, and finally book that dentist’s appointment. Overall, Preloved is a heartwarming and humorous novel with great characters that I would recommend to anyone. People have been moved to think differently about racism, sexism and discrimination through reading fiction rather than reading the facts.Lauren explained, “I had been sold this idea (through TV shows like Friends and Girls) that female friendship is only valid if it's incredibly intense, incredibly close… if you are having baths together, seeing each other naked on a daily basis, holding each other's skirt when you pee onto a pregnancy test stick… If you're really lucky, you do have that in your early 20s, but once you get into your 30s, people's lives start changing. I couldn't have spent a year and a half of my life writing a book that didn't have a hopeful conclusion. The narrative follows Gwen who is in her mid-thirties drifting through life as she finds herself unemployed and still single while her friends are all married and busy popping out kids.

Lauren Bravo Contact me — Lauren Bravo

I burst out laughing within the first few pages, and cackled my way thru the rest of the book, when I wasn’t feeling emotional and teary-eyed, that is. How To Break Up With Fast Fashion came out in 2020 as an exposé of everything wrong with the high street. We then follow Gwen as she haphazardly adopts the perhaps/maybe trope and applies the preloved way as to lead her own re-direction. They linked Gwen to her parents, her brother and her best friend and through their introductions to the tale she slowly started to come back to herself. And while that’s high up our priority list, sometimes we just want to curl up with a chai latte of a novel – an optimistic and engaging (but not too edgy) story that comforts and cossets us.Gwen works with an eclectic group of people where she also finds unexpected connections and friendships. However, reading on, the delicate, poignant connections between the objects, their donors, and the characters in the book revealed themselves to me, bringing a sense of cohesion to the narrative and strengthening its message of the inherent connectedness of our lives, which I greatly admired. Gwen's shrewd observations of life as a 30-something in London were also entertaining and relatable. Full of relatable anecdotes, lively, funny and modern, Preloved is a moving tale of emancipation and friendship.

Preloved — Lauren Bravo

Suze and her husband are at an impasse when it comes to the topic of children; he wants them, but she doesn’t.

Not wanting to give much away, but I also really loved the story between Gwen and her parents, and how they are handling a personal loss that happened to them. It wasn’t full of excitement and action, but it was a gentle meander through a map of stories that were inextricably linked through a series of happy and painful memories. I’m an author and award-winning journalist, writing about fashion, food, pop culture, travel, feminism and life,for people like Sunday Times Style, Grazia, Refinery29 UK, Cosmopolitan, Stylist, easyJet Traveller, Foodism, Delicious, The Telegraph and The Guardian. Preloved is, to me, a story of connections, of memories and about how you need to face the past to move into the future. I loved the concept of this, but it seemed a bit long-winded and sometimes I had a hard time focusing because I just wanted the plot to move along.

Break Up With Fast Fashion by Lauren Bravo | Waterstones How To Break Up With Fast Fashion by Lauren Bravo | Waterstones

The crossover between donors/donations and their stories alongside Gwen and other volunteers' narratives sang for a while and then morphed from quirky to prosaic for me. The main character, Gwen, is relatable and likeable, even though she has her own issues that can be frustrating at times. Are all her friends (married, cooped-up, privy to a life she doesn't care for or have access to) secretly having fun without her?Gwen felt a bit hapless which made relating to her hard, though it does become clearer why as the tale unfolds.