Review: A great debut
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 23, 2014
Blurb:  At eighteen, Julia Jones left for the city with a head full of grand plans for an exciting life that certainly didn’t include her home town of Middle Point – a main street with a pub – or Ryan Blackburn.  Now fifteen years later she has come home to finalise her mother’s estate and she runs smack bang into the town’s new champion who is the same Ryan Blackburn.  The sensible thing to do is to stay away from him and head back to Melbourne as fast as her stilettos can carry her. But Julia finds his offer of a helping hand and a hot body too delicious to refuse and dives into a reckless, one-time fling. What she doesn’t realise is that tomorrow has a way of sneaking up, and that saying goodbye to her home town – and to Ryan – is much harder the second time around.My Thoughts:  NOBODY BUT HIM is a debut novel and the first of the ‘Boys of Summer’ trilogy; it is quite a feather in a debut authors cap to be signed up for 3 books before the first one even hits the shelves!  It took me a chapter or two to settle into the story – but when I did I loved it.  Set in a fictional town on the beautiful Fleurieu Peninsular in South Australia I am familiar with area having holidayed there myself, although I was there for the wine rather than the surf!In winter the small coastal towns are left to their own devices and the local businesses struggle to make ends meet until the summer comes around and there is an invasion of city dwellers getting away from it all.  NOBODY BUT HIM brings to life this almost symbiotic relationship between the long term residents and the city folk. On the one hand the residents resent the influx of tourists, who take over the town for a few months each summer and then leave as suddenly as they arrive; on the other hand they need the money to survive.  Julia left town because she felt that the summer visitors were looking down on her and the other permanent residents making her feel less than important, Julia wanted to be important too so left to go to university in Melbourne where she made a very good life for herself.  Back in her home town she has every intention of just packing up and leaving forever, however she gradually comes to face the fact that she has turned into the very type of person she always despised, and that maybe not all the summer visitors are bad, and that maybe there can me a melding of the two factions.  Maybe, just maybe she has been wrong about everything – including Ryan. Maybe now is the time to think seriously about what she really wants out of life.I loved how Julia grew as a character, how she was willing to compromise and see another point of view.  The same with Ryan, the story of how he went from being a summer surfie boy to a well-respected business man make interesting reading.  When it came to each other though, both Julia and Ryan were stubborn and willing to believe the worst about each other.  Gradually as the story unfolds along with some heart in mouth moments the two gradually realise that they are meant for each other. It took some doing but they were surrounded by some very good friends such as Dan and Lizzie – who I am hoping are going to appear in one of the next two book which I will be keeping an eye out for.