#BlogTour-‘The Sunday Girl’ by Pip Drysdale

About the book…

The Girl on the Train meets Before I Go to Sleep in this chilling tale of love gone horribly wrong …

 “Some love affairs change you forever. Someone comes into your orbit and swivels you on your axis, like the wind working on a rooftop weather vane. And when they leave, as the wind always does, you are different; you have a new direction. And it’s not always north.”

Any woman who’s ever been involved with a bad, bad man and been dumped will understand what it feels like to be broken, broken-hearted and bent on revenge.

Taylor Bishop is hurt, angry and wants to destroy Angus Hollingsworth in the way he destroyed her: ‘Insidiously. Irreparably. Like a puzzle he’d slowly dissembled … stolen a couple of pieces from, and then discarded, knowing that nobody would ever be able to put it back together ever again.’

So Taylor consults The Art of War and makes a plan. Then she takes the next irrevocable step – one that will change her life forever.

Things start to spiral out of her control – and ‘The Sunday Girl’ becomes impossible to put down.

‘My Sunday Girl’ is how Taylor’s boyfriend, Angus, refers to her as being that someone special, the person you want to give up your Sunday to be with-although, in Angus’ case that could as easily been a puppy, a newspaper or his own hand. He literally is a disgustingly toxic male which Pip Drysdale creates to not be emblematic of all men, or all the bad relationships she ever had rolled into one revenge tale, he is so normal that it is disquieting. The porn loving, manipulative, drug taking city dweller is very, very realistically created and you immediately hate him because of this. His very normality and how he expects to get away with how he treats the women in his life.

A disclaimer-I am not reqally a huge fan of the ‘if you loved that then you’ll love this…’ description, as this is a very different kettle of fish to the books it has been described as similar to.

Taylor could have been another ‘woman seeking revenge’ novel, the unreliable narrator/woman on a mission trope has been, quite frankly done to death and my concern is that this could put people off reading it.

I am here to tell you that this is not another ‘man treats woman badly, she formulates a revenge plan, it goes horribly wrong and yet somehow the woman is blamed for all the shitty behaviour the man has indulged in’

The novel begins with Taylor having broken up with the odious Angus. As she casually talks to the reader about him in a wonderful stream of conciousness, she is unbearably honest and as such, you feel like her confidante. She drips things into the story almost subliminally as if they just occurred to her, but to the reader, you wonder why she stayed with him so long, he is genuinely vile.

How many boyfriends would upload a sex tape of their girlfriend , with their real name on, without their consent and when that girlfriend begged for it to be taken down, a)goes on holiday with his ex and b)blame it on a drug addiction?!!?

You begin to think ‘god’s sake Taylor get a grip!’ but as she narrates her life, the patterns she saw in childhood with her father and mother make sense as to why she chose Angus.

Her family hate him, her girlfriends hate him, so why, when she accidentally comes across a copy of ‘‘The Art Of War’ by Tzu Sun does she begin to formulate a plan. Does she want revenge or to drive him back into her arms (for god’s sake, TAYLOR NO!!!) and be forever his ‘Sunday Girl’ ?

And if you are in a battle with an enemy, don’t you kind of want him to know who is beating him, hands down?

Taylor does not use this ancient text to be her background to revenge, she uses it as a survival guide-she is at war with herself as she is not, her past and Angus who is every bd experience she ever had with a man in one horrid package.

You, as a reader,find yourself urging her on to bring Angus down. 

It’s a great read, a wonderfully wrought paean to modern toxic masculinity and modern relationships and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it!

Thanks to Anne CAter of Random Things and Simon and Schuster for my paperback review copy which was gifted!

About the author…

Pip Drysdale is a writer, actor and musician who grew up in Africa and Australia.

At 20 she moved to New York to study acting, worked in indie films and off-off Broadway theatre, started writing songs and made four records.

After graduating with a BA in English, Pip moved to London where she dated some interesting men and played shows across Europe.

The Sunday Girl is her first novel and she is working on a second. She currently lives in Australia.

Links-http://pipdrysdale.com/

 http://randomthingsthroughmyletterbox.blogspot.com/p/services-to-publishers-authors-blog.html