Billy and Me by Giovanna Fletcher: Blog Tour and Review

Morning everyone! I am the second stop on the Billy and Me Blog tour, let's start with my review of this fabulous book by Giovanna Fletcher:

When you've got the dream boyfriend everything should be perfect, right?
So why isn't it? Wonders Sophie May.
When Sophie and Billy met and fell in love, she thought she was living in a fairytale. After all, Billy is an actor, a teen heart-throb adored by girls around the world- and he loves Sophie. She's the only girl for him.
But being on Billy's arm comes at a price. Their relationship has thrown Sophie into the spotlight after years of shying away from all the attention.
Can she handle the constant scrutiny that comes with being with Billy? Most of all, is she ready for her secret heartbreak to be found out and shared with the nation?

Billy and Me is the brilliant debut novel from Giovanna Fletcher. Sophie is working in a little tea shop in her small village of Rosefont Hill when she meets the gorgeous and seriously famous Billy Buskin. They fall in love and Sophie is thrust into Billy's very public life; will she be able to handle the constant attention and is she prepared to put her life on hold in order to support Billy's flourishing career?
The characters of Billy and Sophie are really lovely. At the beginning of the book I found Sophie a little frustrating but as I found out about her past, I understood her actions and attitude a lot more. Sophie has effectively been hiding since her school days, being thrust into the spotlight would be huge for anyone but Sophie finds it particularly difficult seen as she normally does everything she can to go unnoticed.
My favourite character in the book was Molly, she is the owner of Tea-on-the-Hill and Sophie's boss. More importantly though, she is Sophie's best friend. The scenes between Molly and Sophie were particularly touching and they had me in tears at the end of the book.
Giovanna Fletcher is married to Tom from McFly so she obviously has first hand experience of being married to someone famous. Giovanna clearly brings her own experiences to this book but I think she shows that you can still shine in your own right if you are with someone famous. Sophie has to discover who she is and what she wants to achieve just as Giovanna has shown by writing this wonderful book.
As I said, I was in tears by the end of this book and not many have that effect on me. I felt as though Billy and Me was a showcase of Giovanna's writing; she shows how she can be witty, warm, sexy and poignant, all whilst holding the reader's attention. I really hope that we can look forward to more books from this author and I highly recommend Billy and Me.

Dot Scribbles Rating: 5/5

For the blog tour, the very lovely Giovanna Fletcher very kindly talked about where she got the idea for Billy and Me:

A lot of people say you should write what you know. With that in mind, you'd think it would've been easy for me to sit down and write about a girl who fell in love with a guy in a band as I've been in that relationship for almost ten years, and, in fact, that was what I started with when I first got going. My first step was to write out a variety of different ideas and summaries... but I felt so restricted in the band environment. I felt that any idea I had would be questioned as to its origins. Had certain situations happened to me? Is that how I'd felt all that time? The questions would've been endless and they would've focused more on me and less on the characters I wanted to create and portray. I played around with the notion of including the celebrity world that I know, alongside the life of an actor, another life I knew well. 

That was my starting point, but as I started writing and the layers started building it became something else entirely. It's not a simple story of girl meets boy, to me it's far more...but then, I'm bound to say that! 

Giovanna also asked bloggers to tell her the word that came to mind when they looked at the cover of Billy and Me, the word I chose was 'completeness' and here is Giovanna's representation of that in cupcake form:

Thanks for joining me on the second day of the Billy and Me blog, head over to Chloe's Chick Lit Reviews tomorrow!