Christmas at Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop

This has sneaked in as my first read of 2017 but really it was one I started a few weeks before the end of the year but with all the crazy preparations for xmas with 4 children, all the nativity plays, Christmas parties along with an unexpected bout of Chicken Pox for my youngest it took me somewhat longer that normal to work my way through this, my second Jenny Colgan read of the festive season.

It has been a year or so now since I read the first book in this series and so it took me some time to get back into the story of Rosie Hopkins and the little sweet shop she runs in the tiny village of Lipton with her boyfriend Stephen and the care of her elderly aunt Lilian. Time has moved on a little since the end of the first book and now Stephen and Rosie are living together in her Great Aunt's cottage and Lilian has moved into a residential home where she and her old nemesis Ida Delia spend their days plaguing the life out of each other and all the other residents as their old battle over a shared love continues through the years.

Rosie and Stephen are pottering along quite nicely with Rosie running the family business, a tiny little sweet shop that Lilian's family have owned in the village for generations, whilst Stephen is about to start a new career as a Primary School teacher in the village school. Christmas is approaching and all seems calm until suddenly everything turns upside down at once and family announce they are flying in from Australia, an accident causes a major disruption in the village and a setback to Rosie's blossoming romance and a strange new elderly visitor to the village kindles a story that will cause Lilian to realise that perhaps love has one final twist for her also.

Colgan has become the master at these tales, the little quirky villages full of quirky characters with a strong heroine struggling to launch her fledgling business and juggle a blossoming romance at the same time. Simply interchange the heroine and the location of the business to make several successful franchises in the past few years. Be it a bakery, sweet shop or cupcake cafe they have all been phenomenally successful for Colgan and have all enjoyed the development of the characters over several books. Perhaps especially because I had just enjoyed Christmas at the Little Beach Street Bakery I found myself drawing comparisons even more so between it and Christmas at Rosie Hopkins' Sweet Shop. Maybe I should have allowed myself a little more grace between the two to fully appreciate them in their own right.

I didn't find myself flying through this book, desperate to get back to it's story. For me it sort of meandered it's way through with some dramas to keep us reading but without any major surprises along the way. All turned out in the end as I anticipated it would on Page 1, with a happy heroine who has saved the day in the village and got her man whilst enjoying a happy snowy Christmas with all she loved. All the twists and turns along the way were leading us to the conclusion we were destined for all along and I wouldn't have expected Colgan to deliver anything different. She does warm and fuzzy books designed to deliver exactly that feel good factor.

It won't stand out on it's own if I reflect back on it in a years time, I doubt I will be able to separate it from the Christmas counterparts of the other series' Colgan has written but I won't declare that it didn't do what it said on the tin, spread a little Christmas cheer within a world where sometimes that is all too lacking.

This one started really well but went completely downhill once the writer decided to introduce Rosie's paranoia of a family. And the worst thing is that she allowed her heroine to become totally inconsistent to herself and her principles. She became a vulnerable, meek creature, manipulated by that thing she called ‘‘mother''. It was beyond cringe-worthy, it was painful...I kept reading to see whether Rosie would have the guts to utter a proper punch line to her mother and put her in her place, but it didn't happen...

I began to doubt whether she was worthy of Stephen, and most of all, whether she had the will to grasp her life into her hands. Plus, the Henry Carr sub-plot was highly implausible. It seemed to exist just for the sake of added - and utterly failing- melodrama.

Not even close to the first book. It was as if it had been written by a different writer.