Today I’m delighted to be taking part in the blog tour for There’s Only One Danny Garvey. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Danny Garvey was a sixteen-year old footballing prodigy. Professional clubs clamoured to sign him, and a glittering future beckoned.

And yet, his early promise remained unfulfilled, and Danny is back home in the tiny village of Barshaw to manage the struggling junior team he once played for. What’s more, he’s hiding a secret about a tragic night, thirteen years earlier, that changed the course of several lives. There’s only one Danny Garvey, they once chanted … and that’s the problem.

A story of irrational hopes and fevered dreams – of unstoppable passion and unflinching commitment in the face of defeat – There’s Only One Danny Garvey is, above all, an unforgettable tale about finding hope and redemption in the most unexpected of places.

Review:

Apart from reading, football is my other passion, so I jumped at the chance to read There’s Only One Danny Garvey. It’s set in the mid 1990s, which is when my love for football first began so I recognised a lot of the references to players and loved the subtle football jokes that are peppered throughout the novel. But this is not a book about football; football merely provides a backdrop for this cleverly structured story.

The majority of the novel is narrated by Danny Garvey himself, but each of the four chapters also has a second narrator in Higgsy, Damo, Nancy or Raymond. This really helped me to get under the skin of each character, and whilst I didn’t always agree with their actions, I did grow to understand why they did what they did.

Ross’ writing is really emotionally charged and it is clear from the outset that some of the characters are hiding secrets. I was really keen to find out what these were and discover from where the tension originated, but I was also invested in this novel as an issue based story. Ross explores so many emotive issues and I was fascinated by the impact of the issues upon the characters.

The ending of There’s Only One Danny Garvey was unexpected for me, but it is one that I will be thinking about long after I turned the final page.

There’s Only One Danny Garvey is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: