Tag: fantasy

A Hollywood idol. The Virgin Mary. An everyday girl from Hull. Three women, three eras, surprising things in common.

On the night she should have died, Marilyn Monroe has a visitor who changes her life. The Virgin Mary appears in her kitchen with a message. Inspired, Marilyn abandons her home, her life, her fame, and disappears into the night…

Fifty-four years later, in a Hull kitchen, Flora Baker finds Mary, bathed in light. She has a similar message for the working class woman on the poverty line. Flora makes changes that impact not only her life but the lives of those around her…

Do Marilyn and Flora have more in common than Mary’s visit? Are they linked across time? And is Mary’s message for all the women of the world? Wonderful is about the way women are portrayed in both history and the world of celebrity, about women not being quiet, and about women united by the shared stories that shape them.

As a child, Louise Beech told everyone she was going to be a world-famous novelist one day. She once bet her mum ten pounds that she’d be published by thirty – her first newspaper column was published when she was thirty-one. She finally got a publishing deal in 2015 with Orenda Books.

Her debut, How to be Brave (2015), got to No4 on Amazon and was a Guardian Readers’ Pick; Maria in the Moon (2017) was described as ‘quirky, darkly comic and heartfelt’ by the Sunday Mirror; The Lion Tamer Who Lost (2018) shortlisted for the Popular Romantic Novel of 2019 at the RNA Awards and long listed for the Polari Prize 2019; Call Me Star Girl (2019) long listed for the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize and was Best magazine’s Best Book of the Year 2019; and I Am Dust (2020) was a Crime Magazine Monthly pick. This Is How We Are Human was published in June 2021. Louise still hasn’t given her mum that tenner though.

Louise also writes under the name Louise Swanson, and her first book in that guise, End of Story, was published in March 2023 by Hodder & Stoughton and her second, Lights Out, in September 2024. Her play, How to be Brave, toured in 2024. Wonderful was published June 2026.

My thoughts: I, like the author and Flora in the book, love Marilyn Monroe, I am fascinated by her and she talents, she could have gone on to be an even more incredible actor if she hadn’t died at 36.

Which is where this book starts, instead of dying, she disappears and starts over, using her new life to do something good and help other women, women like her who need support and care.

Flora lives in Hull, caring for her mentally ill sister Bella, working in a club and trying to keep her head above water. CARE runs a shelter for women and once took in her sister when she needed help. When the Virgin Mary appears to Flora and tells her to volunteer there and Bella will be ok.

Slowly Marilyn and Flora’s lives come together and the coincidences that bring them together, including another brief appearance from Mary (who I agree with Marilyn, I wish we knew more about her, and her life (I know she ran a catering firm – it’s in the Bible))

It’s genuinely a lovely book, a lovely story and left me with a smile on my face. I wish Marilyn’s story had ended like this, much happier and less tragic than it did in this life, maybe in another universe somewhere it did.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.