#BookReview: WHY MUMMY DRINKS ON HOLIDAY by Gill Sims @whymummydrinks @HarperFiction

Publication: 20th June 2024 – HarperCollins UK

When family life gives you lemons, trade them for grapes!

Mummy Ellen is on a well-earned sabbatical from work, and she has A Vision. She is going to cherish *every* moment this holiday with her Precious Moppets Peter and Jane, alongside her ride-or-die best friend, Hannah. There will be wicker baskets! Vintage bicycles! Pink sunshine wine! And not an electronic babysitter in sight.

But as she strives for her picture-perfect “Ultimate Family Summer” in the sun-kissed bliss of her almost-chateau, reality crashes the party. With small feral hell-beasts to keep alive on the daily, and Hannah suddenly and mysteriously MIA, wine o’clock gets earlier and earlier as each day crawls by.

Can she keep The Vision alive without resorting to nightly beige ‘freezer tapas’ (aka guilt-flavoured chicken nuggets)? Or will she reach the end of her Gentle Parenting book and her tether as her dream holiday descends into a nightmare?

Join Ellen on her uproarious quest to salvage one of the #18PreciousSummers, or simply find her Grape Escape.

AMAZON

WATERSTONES

She’s back! The funniest and most chaotic mother in the world is back right on time for the summer holidays. This year, Ellen has decided to take a two-month sabbatical from her work (which she hates, by the way), so that she doesn’t have to juggle babysitters and summer camps during the school holidays, and she has decided to make the most of it. Together with her best friend Hannah, she’s organized fun activities, picnics and adventures (lots of “japes and frolics”) so that they can have their Summer of Happy Memories. Of course, things never go according to plan. First, Hannah leaves her alone to go and spend three weeks with her ex-husband in Cape Town, so Ellen decides to make new friends (and make Hannah jealous) by spending time with perfect yummy mummies Fiona Montague and Lucy Atkinson’s Perfect Mummy which involves healthy food, intellectual activities, and Fiona’s ever-present clipboard. Then, her disapproving mother moves in with her, luckily Ellen and her family are going to France to spend two weeks at her in-laws “chattete”, but the presence of her crystal crazy sister-in-law (who lives nearby in a house paid for by her) doesn’t help things. Also, it may be time to decide what to do with her life and the job she dreads returning to.

I love the Why Mummy series and I am always looking forward to a new story. I don’t know how many times I laughed out loud while I was reading this book. Why Mummy Drinks on Holiday is hilarious, entertaining, but also relatable as it addresses topics of friendships, how to juggle friends and family, and trying to appear different to be accepted by new friends. Highly recommended!

A huge thank you to HarperCollins and NetGalley for providing me with a proof of the novel.

Gill Sims is the author of the hugely successful parenting blog and Facebook site ‘Peter and Jane’. Her first book Why Mummy Drinks was the bestselling hardback fiction debut of 2017, spending over six months in the top ten of the Sunday Times bestsellers chart, and was shortlisted for Debut Novel of the Year in the British Book Awards. Her globally bestselling Why Mummy… series has now sold over a million copies.

She lives in Scotland with her husband, two children and two Border terriers, because apparently one terrier didn’t cause her enough trouble.

Gill’s interests include drinking wine, wasting time on social media, trying and failing to capture her lost youth, and looking for one of the dogs when he decides to go on one of his regular jaunts, while trying to stop the other one eating unspeakable things.