After the success of the last Nicola May book, I decided to download her other three books from Amazon, they were all less than £1.50 on Kindle so I figured it was a bit of a bargain! The first one I read was this, The School Gates.

My first impression was that there were too many characters, but I think that was because before the first chapter had started, you were introduced to each of the families one at a time. I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up with so many names, but after a while they seemed to sink in. I did feel closer to some of the characters than others though, and a few of the characters were quite stereotypical; like the gay flight attendant and the young Polish au-pair.

But once I had learned the characters, I became more interested in the storyline than I initially thought I would be, but I felt it was lacking a little something. I can’t quite put my finger on what it was, but I think I may have had my expectations set higher because of how much I enjoyed the last book. One of the things I’m not keen on is the amount of ‘cheating’ that seems to go on in the book, but always with a ‘justification’, it doesn’t really sit with my morals so it tends to lessen my enjoyment of the book when it’s added in so freely. Regardless, I did enjoy that it was a very quick read which made me smile with the happy endings all round.