Dear Mrs Bird

Returned my books to the library today to discover my reserved copy of Dear Mrs Bird was in. I'd heard about this from various authors I follow on Twitter and it sounded so brilliant I couldn't wait for it to come out - they'd all had early review copies - and as soon as it did, put my name on it. I shall let you know if it lives up to the hype.

The three books I returned were: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein; Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal; and The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul by Deborah Rodriguez.

I'd probably give them all 2.5-3*. Nothing amazing but all good sunbathing/bedtime reading. The Little Coffee Shop was described on the cover as 'If Maeve Binchy had written The Kite Runner.' Now I've read Maeve Binchy and I've read The Kite Runner and I can safely this this was nothing like the latter. Could have been written by Ms Binchy but is nothing like Khaled Hosseini's story apart from being set in a Middle eastern country.

What all three books did is give a good glimpse into a different style, place or time of living that I enjoyed and all were written by people with experience or knowledge of the topic whether that be running a coffee shop in Kabul, being a female pilot during the second world war delivering broken aeroplanes for repair, or allowing women without a voice to tell the stories they wanted to read.