(courtesy Storm Publishing)
While any kind of Christmas romcom is usually good for the soul, helping you to believe in redemption, healing and true love, the really good ones, at least for this reader, also project a strong sense of cosy and supportive community.
That’s important because finding your special person amidst a whirl of tinsel and flashing lights is a joy, and never to be discounted, it means even more, or at least it feels like it means even more, if all that existential and romantic reinvention takes places within a place where the person at the heart of the story is already deeply and communally loved.
A story then that is wondrous in and of itself, and which leaves you feeling better about the world around you, feels even more wonderful when you know that person’s new romantic focus is simply part, albeit an important part, of an already strong and protective network of love.
That’s why the Christmas tales set in Mickelwick Bay in North Yorkshire, on England’s northwest coast, really hit home even more so for me than other festive romcom stories, wonderful though they are; books like A Snowy Seaside Christmas by Eliza J Scott make the inevitable loved-up status of its protagonist, and sometimes those near to them, feel all the more lovely and sigh-worthy because you know that that is just more love, transformative though it may be, to add to an already existing sense of wellbeing, care and contentment.
Sliding the festive pastries into the oven, it wasn’t long before the spicy aroma of Christmas filled the air, making her [Lark’s] mouth water in anticipation.
The sixth and penultimate book in the Micklewick Bay series, A Snowy Seaside Christmas centres on vintage bazaar shop-owning Lark Harker, a mid-thirties single woman who has an ability to sense psychic aura and to get a sense of the emotional and physical state of people just by looking at them.
She is also able to “see” what the lives of the people who once owned the goods she handles were like, which grants her a powerful sixth sense when she agrees to help her best friend, and the man we know she will inevitably fall in love with, Nate Wilkinson, clear out a very old and supposedly haunted cottage in the centuries-old part of Micklewick Bay.
It’s a creep place and while neither she nor Nate really believe it’s haunted, when they take back two suitcases to Lark’s very cosy and light festooned cottage, one, full of a once well-known local singer’s wardrobe including her wedding dress, gives off warm and loved-up vibes while the other, full of smuggling implements and a pistol, is so full of unsettling auras that Lark’s own cat Luna, usually the queen of fire-adjacent chill, can’t stand be in the same room as it.
As Nate and Lark set out trying to find out the history of the items in both suitcases, and why one is so full of love and happiness while the other screams darkness and violence, they spend more and more time together, forcing relationship-averse Lark to confront her true feelings for her BFF.
(courtesy official Eliza J Scott Twitter/X)
And all in the lead-up to Christmas too!
While Lark has a lot on her hands, she also has a network of close friends in Stella, Maggie, Florrie and Jasmine, four strong and highly supportive successful women who provide Lark, as she provides them in return, with the sort of unquestioning friendship that everyone needs if they’re going to get through life with any measure of success.
Lark is also close to her father who lives in a town some distance from her where he works as a teacher, but who is planning to move home to Micklewick Bay, three years after the tragic and sudden loss of his wife Greer to cancer.
One of the quite wonderful byproducts of Lark and Nate’s historical sleuthing is that Lark’s dad meets Louisa, the new curator at the town’s heritage centre, a widow who quickly bonds with Lark’s father and provides A Snowy Seaside Christmas with an even more loved-up vibe than it might otherwise have.
In fact, because much of the book sits in the romcom familiar world of will-they-won’t-they, at least as far as Nate and Lark are concerned, having her dad and Louisa quickly fall into a companionable nascent love affair is a real joy and an extra piece of romantic momentum for the narrative.
It also means too that Lark and her dad have even more reason to be together, which helps us get to know them both better and makes what happens to them as A Snowy Seaside Christmas goes on all the more meaningful.
The atmosphere suddenly became more intimate. Lark turned her attention to the matter in hand as a murmur of anticipation ran around the room. Buddy [Nate’s dog] looked on, his velverty ears cocked in interest. Lark met Nate’s eye and they shared a smile.
Reading A Snowy Seaside Christmas is like getting an endless wonderful hug.
While the book isn’t heavily themed with Christmas goings-on – unlike some festive romcoms, which featured Christmas markets and fairs and tree lightings etc, the novel mainly sticks to simple things like the unveiling of the bookshop’s highly stylised festive windows and everyone gathering together on a very snowy Christmas Day – it feels cosily festive and alive with the warmth and spirit of the season (which is a good thing because the weather outside is mostly definitely frightful) on almost every page.
That’s likely down to the fact that Scott goes to a great deal of trouble to establish how lovely Lark is, how cosy her world, inside and outside the cottage is, and how beautifully woven into her found family she is, close to her bestie Nate, her four close friends and their husbands/boyfriends, her father, and sundry other wonderful people in a town that feels like one big Cheers-vibe where everyone does seem to know your name.
Reading Scott’s Christmas at the Little Bookshop by the Sea last Christmas – book four of the series for those wanting to read the Micklewick Bay books in order, not all of which are set in the festive season; happily you don’t have to read them one after the other Scott a master of deft expositional placement – was a joy, and A Snowy Seaside Christmas is no different, reinforcing the idea that while fulling in love is gorgeous and all the good things, it’s even better when it takes places in a community where you are loved, supported and where the shooting fireworks of true love will find a place to thrive and grow, long after the first blush of romance has faded.