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    Little Big Love: A Novel
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    Little Big Love: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Little Big Love: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    Little Big Love: A Novel

    Written by Katy Regan

    Narrated by Isabella Blake-Thomas, Katharine McEwan and Nicholas Guy Smith

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    About a Boy meets Parenthood in this smart, big-hearted love story about a family for whom everything changed one night, a decade ago, and the young boy who unites them all.

    Ten-year-old Zac Hutchinson collects facts: octopuses have three hearts, Usain Bolt is the fastest man on earth. But no one will tell him the one thing he wants to know most: who his father is and where he went.

    When Zac's mother, Juliet, inadvertently admits that his dad is the only man she's ever loved, Zac decides he is going to find him and deliver his mom the happily ever after she deserves.

    But Liam Jones left for a reason, and as Zac searches for clues of his father, Juliet begins to rebuild what shattered on the day that was at once the happiest and most heartbreaking of her life.

    Told through the eyes of Zac, Juliet, and grandfather Mick, Little Big Love is a layered, heartfelt, utterly satisfying story about family, love, and the secrets that can define who we are.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 12, 2018
    ISBN9780525596202
    Unavailable
    Little Big Love: A Novel
    Author

    Katy Regan

    Katy Regan was Features Writer and Commissioning Editor of Marie Claire before leaving to concentrate on writing fiction in 2007. Whilst there, she wrote a column ‘And Then There Were Three… Sort Of’ about her experience of having a baby with her best friend (who just remained a friend). This proved so successful it ran for two years and now, ten years on, people still remember it.

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    Reviews for Little Big Love

    3.5/5

    23 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      MY REVIEW OF "LITTLE BIG LOVE" BY KATY REGAN, BERKLEY, JUNE 2018Katy Regan, Author of "Little Big Love" has written a charming, delightful, heartwarming novel. The Genres for this novel are Fiction, and Women's Fiction.  The author describes the characters  complicated and mostly likable. The story is told through the eyes of ten year old Zac, Juliet and Mick, the grandfather.  This is a novel about family, betrayal, love, forgiveness and hope. Zac was too young to be aware of what happened ten years earlier, but is obsessed and fixated on the fact that he wants to know about his biological father. There are deep secrets if revealed can provide the information, but can destroy the family.My favorite character is Zac. I love his innocence, his determination, his persistence, and his loyalty to his friend. In some ways Zac seems more mature than the rest of his family. I would recommend this enjoyable and intriguing novel for those readers who enjoy fiction.
    • 4/5
      This is a lovely story that begins at the beginning of 2015 in Grimsby, a fishing community on the English coast. Ten-year-old Zac, one of the narrators, explains that he has written a letter to his dad Liam to invite Liam to his eleventh birthday party. In the letter he confesses his anger that his dad left and he never knew him, “So I am giving you the opportunity to come to my party when I’m eleven.”Unfortunately, Zac doesn’t know where to mail the letter; his dad “did a runner” when he was born, and neither his mom nor his Nan and Grandad want to talk about him.Zac and his BFF Teagan O’Brien, also living with a single mom, and like him, living on the Harlequin Estate (public housing), are focused on imagining their missing dads. They even have a secret game rating local men on how good a dad the two think each man might be. Zac is a smart and warm-hearted kid who shares, in his narration, what he has learned, such as this insight:“[Other kids] don’t like anyone who stands out, basically. I don’t think any of these things matter - it’s the person inside that counts. But not everyone thinks like that, do they? That’s just not real life. . . . .You can’t see the truth, just by looking on the surface. That’s something else I’d worked out.”These thoughts come to Zac often, since he is teased mercilessly because of his weight. Teagan is the only one he isn’t embarrassed around: “She’s the only person my age who knows I want to be a chef like my Uncle Jamie too. She never looks at me funny.”Jamie was Zac’s mom’s brother; he died at the age of 18 after a fall in which he hit his head. Zac’s Nan has never recovered from the loss of Jamie. She still, after ten years, goes every day but Saturday to Jamie’s grave. Zac stays at Nan and Grandad’s after school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays because his mum has to work, so he too has gotten caught up in the Jamie cult. Sometimes Zac brings a recipe he has made up with him to Uncle Jamie’s grave “so he can read it from heaven.” He likes that his family says he takes after Jamie since Jamie is such a hero to them.In addition to Nan’s enduring grief over the loss of Jamie, she also harbors enduring anger over Liam. Zac says: “Nan doesn’t like my dad because he abandoned us. She says he’s a waste of space. But I think he can’t have been, not if my mum loved him so much, because she’s got good taste, my mum, she knows what a good person is.”Thus, Zac starts the secret Find Dad Mission. Teagan agrees to help him and becomes his Official Deputy.Meanwhile, Juliet, Zac’s mum and the second narrator, has been called to the school to talk about Zac’s weight. They tell her Zac has been the victim of bullying because of it, so it would help if he could lose weight. She even got a letter from the North East Lincolnshire Health Authority warning that Zac is too “obese.”At first Juliet reacts in her habitual way of stuffing away the pain and anxiety with food. Even worse, when Juliet feels helpless she shoplifts. “I don’t even know what I’ve taken… “ It makes her feel as if “I’ve got one up, not on Mr. Singh, the shop owner - I feel eternally guilty about Mr. Singh - but on the universe. Because otherwise I feel like it will swallow me whole.”But when Zac asks more and more questions about his dad, and indicates how upset he is over the fact that Liam left, Juliet decides she owes it to Zac to help him get in shape so he will be happier, and starts her own mission to that end. She enlists the help of a former boyfriend, Jason, who is a fitness trainer. The third narrator is Mick, Juliet’s dad. He is a former fisherman and a former alcoholic, and it is his musings that gradually fill in the reader on what happened to Jamie and Liam.Discussion: The family in this book is very dysfunctional, but not in a way we can’t understand. They are so wrapped up in their own lies, regrets, anger, and fear, they risk damaging the best thing in their lives, which is the endearing and earnest Zac. The author manages to create enough empathy for the characters of Juliet, Zac, and Teagan that you want to stick with the story even if you feel great enmity for and disgust over Juliet’s parents. Evaluation: Two topics I tend to avoid are bullying and dysfunctional families. But this book has so much heart and charm that I was very glad I read it.
    • 4/5
      This was an adorable story of ten year old Zac who is overweight and bullied and just wants to know why his dad left him.Juliet, his single mother, tries to do her best for her very intelligent and imaginative son. However, the family has secrets that involve Zac's dad and only one person can get to the bottom of that secret.Mick is the grandfather who sees a whole new world through his grandson's eyes and also holds a terrible secret.Absolutely delightful read that I thoroughly enjoyed!!Thanks to Berkley Publishing and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.
    • 3/5
      I happened to read this at a time when I was both feeling fat and having breathing problems. I wondered if it was a case of like attracting like, but then realized I was not struggling with addiction (be it alcohol or food), depressed, or searching for a missing loved one. Nice treatment of difficult topics.
    • 3/5
      This is a cute story. I liked Zac and his friend, Teagan. They were so cute together. Yet, at the same time that is sad that the game they came up with involved assigning "dad points" to guys that they thought would make a good dad. Just like Zac; Teagan's father left her and her mother. Yet, I will say that Juliet was just "ok" for me. She may have been a main focal point of the story but it was actually Zac's voices that came out loud and clear in this story. In addition, I will say that the story really seemed to start and pick up for me by the second half. Maybe this is because I was not feeling Juliet or some of the other characters as well as getting to know more about Juliet's story BC Zac. So glad that this story had a happy ending.
    • 2/5
      This was not exactly what I had expected, but it was an interesting read anyways! Little Big Love is written in three changing perspectives – Zac, a young boy who is overweight and searching for his father; Juliet, Zac’s mother; and Mick, Zac’s grandfather who is hiding a few secrets of his own. That one night, years ago, everything changed, and the family only agrees on one thing: Don’t tell Zac. But as he grows up, he becomes determined to discover the other half of his family.There were definitely a lot of things going on in this book, and while I understand that realistically a family could deal with multiple issues at once, I feel like it made the book a little messy because there seemed to be multiple plots going on at once. The book covered alcohol addiction, bullying, obesity, binge-eating, grief, and of course, family; the two big ones were Zac being bullied for being overweight, and him finding out the truth about his father. I feel as though one of these plots should have been treated with more significance with the other, but because they were both often mentioned and were never really intertwined, I felt almost as if I was reading two different stories.The characters were okay; Zac’s narration is definitely in the tone of a child, and it almost made me wonder if this book would be more suited towards a middle-grade reader. I did like the more adult tone of Juliet and Mick’s perspectives, but their voices weren’t nearly as interesting as Zac’s. The author definitely succeeded in making the styles align with the intended narrator.I didn’t really love the characters too much, and while I understand that everyone was dealing with different issues, and that grief is such a powerful emotion, I didn’t feel as connected to them as I could have. Instead, I was frustrated and sometimes, downright annoyed with just how extremely self-centered many of the characters could be.Overall, this was a very typical child-finds-parent story, but with a whole lot more dysfunction thrown in. Lots of people definitely enjoyed this, so ya’ll can still give it a try, but it wasn’t for me.