(courtesy Storm Publishing)
Whenever you plunge into a festive romcom, you rightly expect that you will feel like you’ve given the warmest and cosiest of hugs.
One made of love and redemption and healing and all the trappings of the season from decorations and mulled wine, snowmen and wreaths string happily on a door.
It’s a reasonable expectation and it’s more than met in Eliza J. Scott’s utterly delightful festive novel, Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea, which is that warm hug you were after plus a thousand more besides.
Set, as the entire series of which it is a part has been, in the fictional North Yorkshire coastal town of Micklewick Bay – the beauty of the writing is that even, like this reviewer, you have missed the preceding books, you will feel completely caught, effortlessly and without a hint of expositional clunkiness – Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea centres on delightful couple, Florrie Appleton and Ed Harte who own and run the titular bookshop.
Theirs is, for the very greater part, a bucolic and contented existence; sure they have their hands well and truly full running the bookstore with its large and loyal clientele, author appearances and plans for exciting expansion, but they always find time for each other, they are surrounded by friends who love them dearly and support them endlessly (and they always return the love and then some) and the town in which they live is community of the highest and most inclusive order.
He dipped his head and placed a gentle kiss on her lips, sending her heart into a frenzy. Oh my days! Despite what was going on in the background, she loved this man with an intensity that burnt fiercely inside her.
Florrie turned back to face the room, clapping hard along with the rest of the audience, a huge smile on her face.
It’s a lovely place to live for the characters, but happily for readers, it’s a wonderful place to immerse yourself for a good long while.
While Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea does have some anxious moments with a local clumsy criminal of dubious ability trying to scare them into selling the bookshop and Ed acting a little out of character, it is, for the most part a gorgeous world to inhabit, if only for just shy of 300 very welcome pages.
The brilliance of Scott’s writing, apart from mostly believable dialogue which can be the downfall of festive romcoms if not done right, is that even though the town and its people feel fairytale-ish in their loveliness, there’s never a sense that it feels less than human either.
These are real people falling pregnant, keeping careers humming along, catching up socially and being there for each other, and it’s this sense of communal connectedness and authentic human interaction that gives Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea such a lovely air.
Sure, there’s a larger-than-life festive air to proceedings, and so there should be in a novel as seasonally set as this one, but you feel as if you have joined a real community and its inhabitants going about their day-to-day lives, and it adds some emotional weight to the storyline which is really, for the most part, slice of life stuff with an extra servings of fruit mince pies, sledding and yes, even sleigh rides.
Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea has the lot, and honestly, so fulsomely realised in the Christmas-infused world of Micklewick Bay, and so 3D-alive its inhabitants, that you never ever get the feeling you’re simply reading a festive novel where boxes are being ticked for the sake of it.
In fact, there’s a real warmth and enthusiasm for the subject matter, partly you suspect because the author loves writing the Micklewick Bay series but also because she loves books with a seasonal flavour (“I love writing festive books!” she remarks in an author’s note which is worth reading for some extra insight on the novel) and combining the two feels like a meeting of two passions.
It’s apparent in every page of Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea which is alive with the love Ed and Florrie have for each other (her kindness and love for her boyfriend find spirit-raising form in a December she embarks on for him), for the bookshop they run and for the town which wraps its arms around them every chance it gets.
From Leah and Jean who works in The Happy Hartes Bookshop – founded and named after Ed’s much-loved and very much-missed grandparents – to author friends Jack and Jenna to Florrie group of “lasses” (her best friends referred to by a particularly wonderful North Yorkshore term) and more besides, this is a novel which is full of and runs on love for people, place and things.
It fills your heart with real joy to read it because it’s not just a festive book that talks above love and belonging; it lives it out in every word and paragraph and page.
Each year, on the third Saturday in December, the town held its Christmas market. It was always apopular affair, filling the square with a mixture of festive aromas from roasting chestnuts to mulled wine. The traditional sweet stall was a particular favourite of Florrie’s, the smell of candy infusing the air around it.
Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea is the kind of book that you need to read during the Christmas season because it’s as close to a literary distillation of the most wonderful time of the year as this author has ever found.
You often get to the end of the year and you’re weary from a thousand, tent thousand demands on your time, from the day-to-day exhaustion of catching trains and getting work done and just living life and honestly, beautiful though the Christmas season is, it can often feel like a mad festive rat race all its own.
The perfect thing about Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea is that it takes that inner sense of being depleted, of being empty and wondering how you’ll make it through the blizzard of festive events and replaces it, if just for a time, with a cosy sense that love and tinsel and close friends and festive catch-ups at the pub are all you really need.
A novel like Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea won’t fix all that end-of-year ails you but it will come close because Florrie and Ed, their bookshop and their friends and the town on which they live are a JOY, a panacea to the 21st century disease of constant, unending momentum which will carry you away to the North Yorkshire coast, fill you with the delights of the season and keep you going, with a Santa spring in your step and a “Ho! Ho! Ho!” on your lips, long after the last wondrously good page is turned.