Everything You Ever Wanted: A Florence Welch Between Two Books Pick

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As the book begins, Iris is struggling with her job, spending her days pretending she is on top of nebulous projects with ludicrous names such as Project Salmon Egg. I did enjoy the way Sara Shepard is able to dig into the depths of each character and really get into how everyone deals with their roles as, mother, wife, son etc. As a current young adult who moved from her quaint English hometown to the other side of the World, South Korea, to escape just this, I can relate to the situation wholeheartedly.

It feels jumbled, and while the open-ended elasticity of the scenario ought to be a good thing, it seems accidental, not designed – a symptom of how much is left dangling in a novel that proves more tantalising than fulfilling.There she is given the chance to undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived. Scarlett is young and beautiful, and uses her beauty and The Tits, which are her main asset, to get exactly what she wants from the punters. Her adopted son Scott may have been involved in a hazing scandal --and it may or may not have led to the death of one of the boys he coaches on the school team. The reader learns that one tragic event dissolved the bond between Scott and Charles, Charles and his ex-girlfriend, Sylvie and her (now deceased) husband, as well as the boys and their (now deceased) father. Iris’s encounter with Edie Dalton, the “bold, boyish, sharp” love of her teenage years, is particularly affecting.

Before you all start throwing things at me, I promise that I will be reading her others novels, especially her Pretty Little Liars series. Charles (the uptight older brother)is unhappy in both his work and marriage and still dealing with his dead father's lack of love and affection. She even begins to crave the very things she despised so much on Earth, such as social media and starts to see all the positive attributes of things she previously labelled as bland and void of meaning. And according to the residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa - the world's longest-living people - finding it is the key to a longer and more fulfilled life. Small wonder, then, that the chance of a new life on the pink dusty planet of Nyx appeals: “Softer than suicide, an almost death.Mona was born when Iris was 15 – “too old to be her friend, too young to appreciate babies, too busy counting the years till university when she could finally leave home”. Perhaps the answer is to try to find a way to gather happiness or fulfilment in an alternative way, or perhaps sadly it's meaningless.