Book Review: While We Were Watching Downton Abbey by Wendy Wax

While We Were Watching Downton Abbey by Wendy Wax
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What do you get when an author put a fake historic apartment complex in Midtown Atlanta (my hometown!), put my favorite show in the title, and also make it very interesting, AND have a British Concierge that reminds me so much of Carson? Then you have While We Were Watching Downton Abbey, a book I never thought I'd actually like-I was expected to hate it, but instead I loved it. Every last bit of it.

So I guess I'll split this up between the three characters in the book:

Samantha Davis: Samantha Davis married young to her husband Jonathan Davis because of money troubles after what her father did to the firm. She can't cook, her mother in law hates her, and her siblings are a mess. Her sister Meredith was in New York visiting a friend and her brother Jackson was into a business that failed-in fact, he's been doing it so many times that Jonathan had to bail him out. But Samantha finally put her foot down, thanks to her mother in law, and threatened to cut the both of them off if Meredith didn't take the job at the Atlanta Preservaton Board and if Jackson didn't get a job and make money his own. Well Meredith got the job at the Atlanta Preservation Board, and Jackson....Jackson worked for Edward Parker on Private Butler. Samantha thought it was working just fine, until Jack pulled a stunt so bad that she thought that her friends and Edward didn't want to talk to her after what he did. But it turned out they cared for her, knowing that it wasn't her fault, and also that 'didn't talk till Thanksgiving and before Christmas' thing she went through with Jonathan and that brought them back together.

Claire Walker: So here's Claire Walker, your typical writer who's trying to come up with her next book while writing in her journal, talking to her daughter who's away in college, and making two best friends at the same time. She didn't write not one word till the last episode of season two of Downton Abbey-Claire tried to sleep, but the idea came full force, beating out the Highlanders and men in kilts, as she dreams about her friends and the concierge. And now she's writing the contemporary novel and also she sat in for a author that wasn't feeling well.

Brooke Mackenzie: Brooke Mackenzie is a single mom to her daughters Natalie and Ava, and on top of that her ex-husband, whom she put through college and to make it big in Boston, had cheated and divorced her for a skinnier woman he was sleepin' with, and tried EVERYTHING to get away from him. Then Edward Parker asked her to do a single father's party for his own daughter and everything was right in the world...until one of her daughters let out that the Barbie was pregnant with her ex-husband's child. There was a one time that she had to let Samantha watch over her girls because Zachary wasn't there one the day she needed him to watch the girls. And it was the most beautiful scene ever of Jonathan reading Stellaluna a couple times before the girls went to sleep.

All in all, I truly enjoyed this book-better than I thought. I couldn't stop reading it and it made me wish I was actually living in the Alexander in Midtown (if it was real...and I'd had a job and all that....)

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