Tiny Acts of Love - Lucy Lawrie (2014)

Cassie and Jonathan are ready for a new phase when baby Sophie arrives. They are slowly getting used to taking care of a baby, but Cassie especially finds herself dealing with all kinds of maternal anxieties. At the same time, she is trying to balance her work as a lawyer (which involves a slightly strange case at a funeral home) and being a mother (with her fellow Babycraft support group parents not making her feel any better about the way she is handling things). To make matters even more complicated, her ex-boyfriend Malkie shows up, wanting to get back together with her. Cassie is doing her very best to make everything go as smoothly as possible, but it turns out marriage and motherhood can both be quite a handful to deal with. One of the definite strengths of this novel is the group of well-written and realistic characters, particularly the heroine, Cassie, as she finds herself in situations that will be familiar and relatable to many readers. We are taken along on the emotional journey of marriage and parenthood, which includes laugh-out-loud situations and moving and emotional ones. I was curious to find out which decisions Cassie would make and what situation she would find herself in next. Tiny Acts of Love is a realistic, funny and moving novel that shows the rawness of marriage and parenthood and focuses on those moments we all have of doubting what things could have been like if we had made different decisions. A thoroughly enjoyable debut novel and I look forward to Lucy Lawrie's future work. (JoH)

Lucy Lawrie portrays the rawness of motherhood through humour in Tiny Acts of Love. The summary says: "Surviving motherhood? It's all about having the right support network. Lawyer and new mum Cassie has a husband who converses mainly through jokes, a best friend on the other side of the world, and a taskforce of Babycraft mothers who make her feel she has about as much maternal aptitude as a jellyfish. Husband Jonathan dismisses Cassie's maternal anxieties but is he really paying attention to his struggling wife? He's started sleep talking and it seems there's more on his mind than he's letting on. Then sexy, swaggering ex-boyfriend Malkie saunters into Cassie's life again. Unlike Jonathan, he 'gets' her. He'd like to get her into bed again, too... And on top of all her emotional turmoil, she also finds herself advising a funeral director on ghost protocol and becomes involved in an act of hotel spa fraud, never mind hiding cans of wasp spray all over the house to deal with the stalker who seems to be lurking everywhere she looks. Marriage and motherhood isn't the fairytale Cassie thought it would be. Will her strange new world fall apart around her or will tiny acts of love be enough to get her through?"

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