The Favour

A fascinating mystery novels set in the beautiful land of Italy, and depicting the story of jealousy and rivalry in seemingly perfect surroundings. Highly recommended!

I liked “The Favour” for several reasons: A social climber from impoverished nobility embarking on a modern Grand Tour of Italy with a bunch of rich kids for the sole purpose of forging connections to set her up for life. A modern take on “Remains of the Day”. Revisiting places I’ve loved and visited in the past and that I Iong to visit again. A great portrayal of the shifting sands of friendships, hierarchy and loyalties spiced with scandals, secrets and death.

What would you do if, at 18, you were given a glamorous trip to Italy by your wealthy grandmother, finally giving you the life you dream of and the ability to become the person you want to be? That's what happens Ada Howell. But when there's a murder can she really trust her new friends and how far will she go to keep them?

I was really absorbed in the story and loved the twist, even though Ada's character is hard to like. There's definitely an aura of Patricia Highsmith's 'The Talented Mr Ripley' in the book. An accomplished novel.

Wow this was fantastic. An absolute pleasure to read and vastly entertaining. All the characters were complex and ones you loved to hate especially the narrator. You felt at times almost embarrassed by her obsession with being so rich and wealthy that she almost loses her identity. She does eventually realise but only until it’s too late. This is one that hooked me from the start and never let me go. Brilliant and sharp and very very moving.

My thanks to Atlantic Books Corvus for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Favour’ by Laura Vaughan in exchange for an honest review.

‘Fortune Favours the Fraud...’

Ada Howell was thirteen when her father, a successful author, died. As a result Ada not only lost a father and her family home but the life that she felt destined to lead. When some years later she is disappointed about not being accepted into Oxford, her godmother offers to send her on an extravagant eight-week art history trip to Italy in which eleven young ‘dilettantes’ will be escorted by three experienced tutors.

Meeting the others, Ada finally feels that she is among the kind of people that she aspires to be: sophisticated, cultured, and privileged. As a result, Ada does everything in her power to prove that she is one of them. When a member of the group dies in suspicious circumstances, Ada has the opportunity to provide a favour. She feels that this will permanently bind her to the key members of the group, securing their friendship. Yet does it? How these bonds develop over the years takes up the second half of the novel.

Ada is not a pleasant person. She serves as the novel’s narrator and is quite open about her motivations. Her desperation to be accepted by this entitled clique was often painful to witness and her behaviour came across as parasitic.

The socially ambitious outsider, who becomes embroiled in secrets and lies, is an established trope, particularly in novels featuring those on the threshold of adulthood. As the novel’s anti-heroine, Ada had a few echoes for me of Tom Ripley, especially when in Italy.

The cast of characters of ‘The Favour’ was quite large and so I made some notes when the members of the tour group were first introduced. While not all went on to be central to the overall plot, I found it a useful exercise.

I felt that Laura Vaughan’s writing was very good. Her descriptions of the novel’s Italian locations were evocative and made it easy for me to feel like an invisible 12th Dilettanti.

‘The Favour’ is the kind of novel that ticks all the boxes for me: an engaging plot, well developed characters, and vivid settings. I also felt that the mystery aspect was well handled, not dominating other aspects of the narrative yet always present in the background waiting until the time was right.

This is Laura Vaughan’s debut novel for adult readers and I look forward to news of her future projects. I also feel that ‘The Favour’ would be a good choice for reading groups, as it’s not only an engaging read but an ambiguous protagonist often generates lively group discussion.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5.

The way Ada is a misfit in the group of wealthy dilettantes is so creatively written that you almost feel sorry for her and wish her godmother had found a different way to help her expand her horizons, but there is an edge to Ada that leaves you discomforted from the outset and as the group progress through fist Italy and then life it becomes apparent that she is manipulative and sly, although perhaps not as much as some of the other loathsome characters!
Italy springs to life during her grand tour and the deceptions and lies thereafter make me want to shout at the characters for being so foolish!

Novels with a flawed character as the protagonist have been well done in the past (I am thinking here of 'The Woman in the Window' or 'The Girl on the Train') but to draw readers into a novel that has a flawed sociopathic character is a different skill altogether that the author of 'The Favour' pulls off magnificently.
The sociopathic protagonist that drives this book is Ada who is obsessed with class and whose overriding ambition is to re-join the the wealthy elite she feels she belonged to before her adoptive father’s death. When Ada’s godmother treats her to an art history trip around Italy, where she will be in the company of people who meet Ada’s elitist definition, she cannot believe her luck. As the novel is presented in Ada’s narrative voice, her compulsive scheming, lying, blackmail and deceit occasionally become difficult to bear – at times I found myself wishing for another, more likeable, character to take over just to get a break from Ada, but Vaughan’s skill is making you overcome such antipathy and to read on and on. The narrative, which covers the Italian trip first and then, at greater speed, the ensuing years, is unusual, but one fantastic structural element is the epilogue when we get a final close-up of just the fallible Ada. A definite five stars from me for this novel, and my sincere thanks go to the publishers and to NetGalley for the ARC provided to be in return for this honest and unbiased review.

The rejection by Oxford came as a bit of a shock to Ada Howell: she was, after all, the daughter of the renowned author, Anthony Howell, who'd been to this college. Well, she wasn't actually Howell's daughter: he'd married her mother after her birth and had then adopted her, so she was 'chosen' rather than just 'made', which was better really. And whilst we're being honest, we might as well admit that 'renowned author' might be stretching the truth a little: his books degenerated into self-published poetry which Ada couldn't understand. Still, Ada had felt entitled and this was why her godmother's offer had come at such a brilliant time.

Delilah Grant, her father's last-remaining friend as well as her godmother, offered her the chance of going to Italy on a two-month trip to study art history. Delilah would fund most of the trip but Ada would have to come up with some of the funds herself. It felt like such a turn-around. Her mother had sold the family home, Garreg Las, in Wales, after her father's death and bought a three-bed Edwardian terrace house in Brockley. It didn't have the same cachet as the early-Regency mansion. Now she had the opportunity to mix with the sort of people she should be mixing with.

It's a little unfortunate that when she arrives in Venice she joins a group where there are established friendships and relationships. She's always going to be the odd one out, or, rather, one of the two odd ones out. Mallory Kaplan is American and she's not completely attuned to how the British upper classes operate. She doesn't understand the stiff upper lip and it's not long before she's seen as a bit of a nuisance. Still, they're all dilettanti now and the brochure had promised that they'd be making friends and connections for life. Ada doesn't actually lie about her past, but she relies heavily on the nostalgia of Garreg Las, the pain of its loss and how much her father meant to her. She just has to ensure that she's needed, welcomed in, by this group.

Petra Deane was a child actor and has the confidence to go with it. She's in an on-off relationship with Lorcan Holt, who's the half-sister of Anabelle Gilani (who seems to be the only person, apart from Ada, who's on a budget). She's also in a relationship with ones of the 'cicerones', Dr Nathan Harper, whose wife, Clemency, hasn't accompanied the group. Lorcan is a school friend of Willa Murray and he's also the cousin of Nate Harper. And that's just a selection of the dilettanti on the tour.

Complicated, isn't it? Author Laura Vaughan does a brilliant job of bringing the individual characters out of what could have been an amorphous mass. Apart from Ada, they're all privileged, assured of their place in the world. How is Ada going to fit in? Well, she does a favour...

The 'tour' begins in Venice, moves to Florence and then to Rome and on the way we're given judicious looks at the art and architecture - just enough to what your appetite but not so much that the story is overwhelmed. It's more than forty years since I did the same trip (with a very-much-reduced time scale, I hasten to add) and it brought back some good memories.

The plot is exceptional: I finished the book in less than twenty-four hours because I simply had to find out what happened and the denouement had me gasping - I really didn't see it coming. I'm looking forward to seeing what Vaughan writes next and I'd like to thank the publishers for making a copy available to the Bookbag.