More Than Love Letters - Rosy Thornton

When Richard Slater receives a letter of complaint from one of his
constituents, a Margaret Hayton, he merely responds with his standard letter of empty promises. Clearly, this woman is insane and must be avoided at all costs. But she will not be dismissed so easily, and when Richard finally sets eyes on the ‘twenty-something vision in stone-washed denim, with a cloud of dark ringlets and huge, serious eyes’ he risks losing his heart, his head and quite possibly his political career.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I added this More than Love Letters to the TBR pile except for the fact that it was chick-litish and written in the form of emails and letters which attracted my attention. But in fact this story was much more than this and I had a real hard time putting it down each time I had to get back to real life.

More than Love Letters is Margaret Hayton’s story, She is a twenty three year old teacher who feels passionately about a variety of subjects that lead her to write to her MP about them and to volunteer at a women’s shelter.

Richard Slater is the aforementioned MP who keeps receiving Margaret’s letters and answering them with standard letter reply and believing she must be an old biddy with too much free time. That is, till the day they meet and they both realize the other is not what they thought.

While telling their story, Thornton, in an apparently light hearted manner, approaches a lot of less light subjects and the mix of it all is what makes it so attractive and compelling. Margaret is warm hearted and caring and that really shines through in the book making you close it with a smile in your face. She is sometimes naive but in a good and endearing way.

Not only the correspondence between Richard and Margaret but also the exchange they have with their friends about their developing relationship and what’s going on around them contributes to the final success. The whole cast of secondary characters, some funny, some tragic, combine to give the story an unexpected depth. And the author very successfully manages to convey a reality that is very British and could be off putting for readers not aware of it.

The twists and turns the story will take will keep you reading till you reach the last page and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Grade: 5/5