The Switch

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RATING: ★★★★★
TITLE: The Switch
AUTHOR: Beth O’Leary
RELEASE DATE: either April 16, 2020 or August 18, 2020
SETTING: London and Yorkshire
PUBLISHER: Macmillan Audio for Flatiron Books
GENRE(S): Contemporary Romance, Women’s Fiction/Chick-Lit, Humor, Family

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Thank you to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio and Flatiron Books for my ALC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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BLURB

Eileen is sick of being 79.
Leena’s tired of life in her twenties.
Maybe it’s time they swapped places…

When overachiever Leena Cotton is ordered to take a two-month sabbatical after blowing a big presentation at work, she escapes to her grandmother Eileen’s house for some overdue rest. Eileen is newly single and about to turn eighty. She’d like a second chance at love, but her tiny Yorkshire village doesn’t offer many eligible gentlemen.

Once Leena learns of Eileen’s romantic predicament, she proposes a solution: a two-month swap. Eileen can live in London and look for love. Meanwhile Leena will look after everything in rural Yorkshire. But with gossiping neighbours and difficult family dynamics to navigate up north, and trendy London flatmates and online dating to contend with in the city, stepping into one another’s shoes proves more difficult than either of them expected.

Leena learns that a long-distance relationship isn’t as romantic as she hoped it would be, and then there is the annoyingly perfect – and distractingly handsome – school teacher, who keeps showing up to outdo her efforts to impress the local villagers. Back in London, Eileen is a huge hit with her new neighbours, but is her perfect match nearer home than she first thought?

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This was absolutely delightful! I need this to be a movie!

From the beginning to the end I reveled in this incredibly heart warming story. Deciding to switch lives for two whole months, grandma Eileen and granddaughter Leena learn a lot about themselves.

When Eileen goes to Leena’s flat in London she is looking for love, or at least some fun. She certainly finds it. She makes friends with Leena’s friends and makes plenty of new ones. She is a gem of a woman and I enjoyed so much her chapters. She has this great way of bringing people together. She pulls people in and they are always better afterwards.

Leena gets an involuntary break from work and decides to attempt to mend things with by staying at her grandmother’s house. But, she also has to take over all of Eileen’s duties in the town. That means getting involved in the neighborhood and all the events that take place. I loved Leena because her life is a mess at the start of her stay and she learns SO MUCH about herself during her stay. She is stronger and happier for it.

This wasn’t all happiness and sunshine. I felt so many emotions during this book. Leena and her mother’s relationship needs mending because the two didn’t know how to cope with Leena’s sister’s death. It added a very real, very hard hitting aspect to the overall book. That epilogue had me in tears.

And let me say, I am so glad I had the opportunity to listen to The Switch. The spot on narration of Alison Steadman as Eileen and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Leena completely MADE this book for me. They bring you 100% into the story. It definitely helped paint a picture in my mind as I went along. Like I said before, this needs to become a movie. It was so so wonderful.

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