Lucy's Little Village Book Club by Emma Davies

Lucy is, not to put too fine a point on it, a meddler.  She can't help herself, she has to put people's lives to rights.  Having given up on her dream of becoming a teacher she starts work at the local library and that's where her penchant for interfering really kicks in.  Starting a book club mean she becomes overly involved in the lives of it's handful of members.  Her age is also very hard to pin down, at times her reactions are like those of a mid-teens school girls and at others she behaves like a much older woman - I guess this is realistic as our responses to situations can be all over the place.  I did find her irritating and couldn't really understand why the populace of the book seemed to almost revere her.

Fortunately, it is the supporting cast of characters that make this book.  This is particularly so with Lia, carer to her mother and desperate to learn to dance, desperate for a simpler way of life, desperate to emulate her mother's youth.  The difficulties of looking after someone with Dementia are clearly articulated but with a sense of this is just how things are rather than "poor me pathos" which it could so easily have slipped in to.  Her friendship with single mother Hattie is just beautiful and the sort of friendship that we would all love to have.

Hattie's tale of being a single mother is poignant and you have to admire her strength in choosing her situation when you find out what a rat her fiance was.  The tension with her family relationships is well told, even though you have a good idea of where this is going and how it links with other characters in the book.  We don't choose our families and Hattie's determination to make things right with her mother - even though she doesn't know what she did wrong - is drawn perfectly.

I also loved the fragile gentility of widower Oscar.  Definitely a gentleman from another era with the manners and reticence to prove it.  The glimpses we get in to his life are heartbreaking but they haven't broken him.  He has some rather strident views and misconceptions about people but isn't afraid to apologise when he is wrong and he does his best.

The other "main" character is 19 year old Callum, a young man struggling to better himself, struggling to distance himself from his family who he sees as feckless.  He is painfully shy and this comes across so well on the page and when he is "taken in" by bride-to-be Phoebe you do feel for him.  The development of his close relationship with Lisa and her family is believable, although I couldn't help but wonder if her cared far more for the idyllic family set up than for Lisa.

I may not have liked the main character at all but the people she is surrounded with are so well drawn that I couldn't help but fall in love with the book.  You feel like you are going on their journeys with them and all through the book you are wishing for them to get their happy ending - whatever that might be for each person.  The plot is soothing and gentle and even a little thrilling in person as secrets are uncovered and divulged.  This could so easily have dissolved in to mawkishness but somehow Ms Davies has avoided this pitfall.

**Review originally published January 15th, 2018**