I Know You by Annabel Kantaria

This was a good premise for a book but one I have now read several times, that doesn't mean it is bad it just means that it is now becoming a standard to use Social Media as a means for stalking in the plot.  Fortunately in this book it is well executed and it has the added bonus of reminding people to be careful what you post and to check those privacy settings carefully.

The best bits for me were the stream of snark directed at the victim from the stalker - be honest we have all had "those" thoughts when reading someone's Facebook / Instagram / Twitter feeds.  I did actually find some of them quite funny - especially the stalkers diatribes about her book reviews and her foodieness.

One thing the author did well was disguise who was being stalked here - it could have been Taylor or it could have been Anna and it isn't made clear until near the end exactly who the object of the stalker's hatred is.  There are also multiple plausible candidates for the role of stalker and the book is nicely twisty so that you keep changing your mind.  Unfortunately, about 25% of the way in I figured out who was being stalked and by whom so the rest of the book became much less intriguing.  Luckily there was  a nice twist at the end with the real identity of the stalker (something I didn't see coming as it was a little bit of history we had not been made privy to); also the denouement was quite shocking.

I did enjoy the book, it just didn't make my heart race or my fingers itch to get to the next page to reveal all.  The characterisations are good and the neediness of Taylor alone in a foreign country with a husband constantly away for work was well described.  All the other characters from Anna and Simon to the lesser ones of Susan and Caroline are also fleshed out nicely on the page.  I'm not sure what was missing from this one for me but it didn't quite check all my boxes for a compulsive read.

I will try another one or two of this author's works as she has good ideas that she is well able to execute on the page.

Christmas Secrets In Snowflake Cove by Emily Harvale

This was an okay read, I never really managed to get absorbed in to the place or the people if I'm being honest.  I was conscious of reading the story all the way through rather than becoming immersed in it and eagerly turning the (virtual) pages to get to the next happening in the lives of the Starrs.  Things did settle down towards the latter half of the book and I did start to enjoy myself a bit more - but I still couldn't work up the wherewithal to worry about what Darren was up to or what was going between Jessie and Mr Joshua(?) Thorn.

The setting is well described and you could smell that ozone and feel the sting of salt in the air.  Even Michelmas Bay sounded like an enchanting medium sized town that was strangely full of independent shops without a chain to be seen.  Got to love that about fictional places, they still have a non-homogenised High Street, or evena  High Street at all.

I never really felt as though I knew any of the characters on the page though.  This book may have been about Evie but apart from her best friend's younger brother, Roland, having a major crush on her, her not really getting on with her sister Severine I never really felt like she was more than words on a page.  Her grandmother Jessie, whilst being a mainly peripheral character, was far more interesting and I think I would have preferred to hear more from her than Evie.

The book is undoubtedly festive and taps right in to the collective nostalgia for a Christmas I think few of us have experienced - roaring log fires, snowball fights and lashings of hot chocolate.  It is almost filmic in its Christmas tropes which is no bad thing when you are curled up on the couch waiting for your belated Christmas celebrations to begin (I worked Christmas Day and in to Boxing Day so we had a later than the calendar family celebration).

Not a bad book really just not an immersive read and it didn't make me interested enough to get the second in the series.

I'll Be Home For Christmas by Roisin Meaney

3.5 Stars

Well, a lot has happened on Roone since I last visited - most notably Laura has added to her family with another baby daughter.  In fact, this caused me to spend the first few pages convinced I'd been here before but something just didn't quite match up for me then George the Donkey got a namecheck and I remembered reading about this rather odd Irish Isle previously and it all began to slot in to place for me.  To be honest, the book did get slightly more enjoyable from that point on as I realised these were a set of characters I had already been introduced to (I must read the first of the 3 books set on Roone).

This tale though is all about Tilly and her search for her sister.  You see, she was born in Australia and found out 5 years ago that she had been adopted; now she is 17 she has finally traced her rather disinterested birth mother and found out that she has a full sister.  After a disastrous event in her personal life she decides to travel to Roone to meet her sister in the hope she can run away from her problems and hide out with her.  She lies to her adoptive family and manufactures a Balinese holiday with a friend's family to explain her absence and off she sets.

As with most of Ms Meaney's novels the book covers the lives of disparate people, so, interspersed with tales of Tilly's fateful (and very eventful) journey we get regular updates from Laura.  This isn't a Laura we recognise from previous books - this is a struggling Laura, her sunny disposition lost to personal circumstance and a trying mother-in-law.  When the storm hits Roone all communication with the outside world is lost and, most worryingly, so is the strange apple tree that fruits all year round.  Does the storm bring good with it too?  It certainly blows more "trouble" in to Laura's life and leaves Tilly stranded.

As with all of her books this deals with the eternal themes of love and loss.  Even though this book is set at Christmas we still have death to contend with and severe illness alongside the usual family borne frictions.  The huge dollop of real life could add a depressing dimension to the read but somehow it lifts it in this reader's estimation.  Whilst escapism and happy ever afters are nice something with a bit more bite is always welcome.

Unfortunately, for me, the characters just didn't come alive in the way I felt they should have done.  Gavin's Mother (Gloria) and Laura's Father in particular are very two dimensional and the characters that Tilly meets on her long journey from Heathrow to Dublin to Roone are either ne'er do well Southerners or salt of the earth Irish and it did begin to grate a little with me.  Tilly and Laura are at least very full feeling characters and I loved the changes wrought in Laura and her attempts to get her old self back - this rang so true (fortunately my reasons for the massive change in my personality were far less traumatic than hers) and was dealt with beautifully.  Tilly is 17 and it shows but the author managed to get all the insecurities and constant self-doubt of this age on to the page without making Tilly a caricature.

This is a very good read but it was the lack of characterisation of the supporting cast that marked this one down for me.

A Gift From The Comfort Food Cafe by Debbie Johnson

4.5 Stars

Ah, good old Budbury, a place that belongs in a different age.  An age where life is slower and everyone has their place in the world, knows what that is and sticks to it.  This is a good, old-fashioned romance set in the modern era in a town that is, to the say the least, magical.  The themes of the book don't stand up to tight scrutiny but for sheer enjoyability this one rates very highly.

Katie we have met before, she is a peripheral character mentioned in a couple of the earlier Budbury books but now we get the chance to find out much more about her and her little boy.  Like many of the influx of newcomers poor Katie has had a rough time of it, this time it is not at the hands of a man but rather the effects her parents all out fighting had on her.  She more than shies from confrontation she runs a million miles from it and any other social situation.  Will Budbury coax her out of her self-imposed exile?  Will Auburn and Willow's brother Van manage to break through that hard defensive wall?  You know you shouldn't really care and deep inside you know exactly how it will end but still you find yourself compelled to read on.

I'm not quite sure just how Debbie Johnson manages it but her characters are lively and honest, even the bad bits about their personalities are laid bare but you find yourself falling in love with them.  She writes with warmth, charm and wit and this sucks you in to the story despite all your better judgement and leaves you with a wistful smile on your face and the fervent wish that you could find your own Budbury.  The whole Comfort Food Cafe series exist in a place untouched by real life and yet an integral part of it but they work through the power of the people that live there.

This was a joyous festive read.  To be fair Christmas is a peripheral adjunct to the main story but there is enough there to make this a nigh on perfect seasonal read.  If you want some escapism with a happy ending that doesn't leave you fearing you will get Type 2 Diabetes then this one fits the bill nicely.

Christmas Magic by Cathy Kelly

3.5 Stars

I don't think that short stories are really this author's forte to be honest, a lot of them felt more like a synopsis for a longer read which meant that just as you were settling in to the tale it would end.  The other problem I found with a lot of them was that there is little characterisation that you can suck from the page so I ended up just going off how much I enjoyed the plot of the tale rather than the whole of the story.

This is a mixture of tales set at all times of the year, so if the title made you think that was a collection of festive tales then prepare to be disappointed.  I did enjoy the mix but the author has a very obvious voice which shone through in each story, this does mean that they all began to feel a little like they were about the same set of people.

In order to get an honest score for the book I marked each story as I went along:

Christmas Magic - 3.5 Stars
Anniversary Waltz - 3.5 Stars
Madame Lucia - 4 Stars
Off Your Trolley - 3 Stars
May You Live In Interesting Times - 3 Stars
A Villa By The Sea - 2.5 Stars
The Gap Year - 3.5 Stars
Cassandra - 3 Stars
Letter From Chicago - 4 Stars
Bride And Doom - 3 Stars
You've Got Mail - 5 Stars
Christmas Post - 3.5 Stars
The Trouble With Mother - 4 Stars
The Paradise Road Book Club - 3 Stars
The Angel Gabrielle - 2.5 Stars
Lizzie's Fling - 3 Stars
Thelma, Louise And The Lurve Gods - 3.5 Stars
The Office Christmas Party - 2.5 Stars
A Family Christmas - 3 Stars

I was going to do a brief review of each tale but as they all began to merge in to one after a while I decided it was probably best not to.

This collection has not really made me want to read any further of the author's works which is probably unfair as the short story is a form all on it's own which many longform authors struggle with.  Nothing here is really bad, it just didn't engage this particular reader.  They are easy to pick up and set down so it does make it the perfect book for the coffee break.

The Adults by Caroline Hulse

2.5 Stars

This is touted as being a humourous book, sorry but I found little humour between these pages - maybe it slipped past me but I really couldn't find it.  There were scenes which made you squirm uncomfortably in your seat, I wonder if these were supposed to be where the humour lay?

I did enjoy the plot of the tale though - the idea behind a divorced couple spending Christmas together with their respective partners all for the sake of their young daughter was a good one.  Unfortunately the author ruined it slightly by having them share a cabin in the holiday village they go to (any resemblance to a popular chain starting with Centre and ending in Parcs is entirely coincidental *coughs*).  This stretched the bounds of believability uncomfortably for me.

The main characters we see things from are the two women concerned - Claire and Alex with a goodly dollop of Patrick thrown in, Matt is pretty much an occasional character unless Alex is thinking about him.  Unfortunately their voices aren't sufficiently different to really tell them apart on the page so it all becomes a bit of a mish mash on the page.

The denouement is flagged early on with the insertion of transcripts of police interviews following "the incident".  The only thing we don't really know is what happened in the field and when we do find out the story they concoct for the police is laughable and does not hold water at all.  It definitely wouldn't wash in the real world but as this is a work of fiction they seemingly get away with it.

The writing has a good pace to it and the author does seem to have a pretty good grasp of relationships and how people work on an internal level.  Fortunately this was enough to keep me reading even though the story itself was not actually that good.

The Little Christmas Teashop Of Second Chances by Donna Ashcroft

To be fair this book could have been set at any time of the year, the seasonality did feel tacked on to the story rather than Christmas being an integral part of the story.  To be fair that didn't really detract from the story itself, it all felt a little lacklustre if I'm being honest.  There are some interesting sections - Lily's communication with the mother who abandoned her when she was 2, her desire to be a chef and the almost crippling anxiety she feels about trying - but much of it left me feeling all a little blah.

The characterisations are pretty good but apart from Lily they did have little depth.  To be honest Lily's character put me in a bit of a quandry as she vacillated between the perfect doormat and this tough, sarcastic young woman and the disparity between the two felt forced on the page and without the nuance that real people have.  I understand what the author was signalling to the reader with this disparity but it felt a little overblown  There was an attempt to add depth to Josh's character but it was never really successful and the overriding image I came away with of him was that he was confident in his professional talents but rather mediocre as a person - not what we want from our hero.

The plot actually saved this book for me as it meandered nicely and covered some lovely little side vignettes - I particularly liked the Marsha and Simon glimpses.  The writing also has a good dose of wry humour, the kind that makes you smirk knowingly to yourself rather than belly laughing - I like a bit of snark.

Overall a fairly solid book that entertains the reader but isn't unputdownable.