From Notting Hill with Love ...Actually by Ali McNamara for Sourcebooks

Please join me in welcoming Ali McNamara, author of Notting Hill with Love…Actually to Celticlady's Reviews!

1  Tell me about your book. How did you come up with the story?

‘From Notting Hill with Love…Actually’ is about Scarlett, who absolutely adores the movies, but her family and friends think she’s a bit too obsessed by them. So when Scarlett gets the chance to house-sit in one of her favourite movie locations, Notting Hill, she see’s this as a chance to prove to them that you really can live your life as if it were a movie.

I was watching one of the music channels on TV one day. It was a countdown of the Top 50 best movie songs of all time. I just thought wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could feature as many of those movies as possible in one story, as that’s how the idea began to develop.

How did you get interested in writing this particular genre?

When I began writing I didn’t set out to emulate a particular style or genre, this is just the way I tell stories, my natural voice some people might call it. I just say - this is me!

What kind of research did you do for this book?

I watched lots of movies! Some I’d never seen before, some I had, but it was a pleasure to revisit them again and make lots notes of scenes I could possibly use in the book. I also took a trip to Notting Hill to do research, as it was an area of London I’d never visited before.
      

Ali McNamara

www.alimcnamara.co.uk

Twitter @AliMcNamara

About The Book

Scarlett O'Brien is in love . . . with the movies. Utterly hooked on Hugh Grant, crazy about Richard Curtis, dying with lust for Johnny Depp, Scarlett spends her days with her head in the clouds and her nights with her hand in a huge tub of popcorn. Which is not exactly what her sensible, DIY-obsessed fiancé David has in mind for their future. So when Scarlett has the chance to house-sit an impossibly grand mansion in Notting Hill ? the setting of one of her all-time favourite movies ? she jumps at the chance to live out her film fantasies one last time. It's just a shame that her new neighbour Sean is so irritating ? and so irritatingly handsome, too. As a chaotic comedy of her very own erupts around Scarlett, she begins to realise there's more to life than seating plans and putting up shelves. What sort of happy ending does she really want? Will it be a case of Runaway Bride or Happily Ever After? The big white wedding looms, and Scarlett is running out of time to decide.

About the author

Ali McNamara attributes her over active imagination to one thing - being born an only child. Time spent when she was young dreaming up adventures, has left her head constantly filled with stories waiting to be told.

When stories she wrote for fun on singer Ronan Keating's website ten years ago became so popular they were sold as a fundraising project for his cancer awareness charity, Ali realised that not only was writing something she enjoyed doing, but something others enjoyed reading too.

Ali lives in Cambridgeshire with her husband and two children, and when she's not writing she loves to exercise and walk her two labrador dogs.

Find out more at her website: http://www.alimcnamara.co.uk/

My Thoughts:

Funny chic lit at it's best. Scarlett, the main character, needs to prove to her family that her obsession with movies is not an obsession at all. To her it is who she is. She takes some time and takes a house sitting job to just get her head on straight. While in Notting Hill she meets one of her neighbors who stirs passion in her. The fun part of the story is that she is able to recall every instance in her adult life with a scene or line from a movie. A side story is of Scarlett trying to find her mother, who left her and her father before she can even remember. Scarlett is engaged to be married to David in a few weeks but finds that she may not want this...Does she actually marry David or does she stay with Sean, her sexy neighbor?? You will have to get the book and read it for yourself. I found this book to be a lighthearted humerous book. I enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone out there who love the chic lit genre.

I received an ecopy of this book for review from Sourcebooks and was not monetarily compensated for my review.