Christmas On The Little Cornish Isles: The Driftwood Inn by Phillipa Ashley

I purchased this book last year but ran out of festive season before I could read it and somehow reading Christmas books outside of November and December feels just plain wrong.  So, I hiked it high up on my 2018 list of reading musts for Yuletide.  To be honest, I rather wish I hadn't as I never really sank in to the tale and found it all a little predictable and dare I say it (dare, dare!) boring.  The writing is actually rather good and there is a nice wry humour and a gently unfolding plot that should soothe the reader in to the story and absorb you in the place and the people.  To be entirely honest I think it may have been the setting that did it for me - I live in a small town but a town nevertheless and the sheer rurality of the Little Isles and their reliance on the weather to get the most basic of necessities to them is so far from my sphere of experience that I spent a lot of time mentally wondering how I would cope in that place rather than inhabiting the fictional world.

That said I did find the characters to be all a little flat.  Maisie was the best of the lot though, with her conflicting emotions warring within it made you unsure exactly how she would react in any given situation.  This just made her feel like a woman determined to grab her life with both hands and enjoy it as best she could for as long as she could and I really enjoyed that about her.  Sadly the other characters were a little bit two dimensional for my tastes.  Patrick infuriated me, somehow despite all his layers and personal tragedies and triumphs he never really became more than a bunch of words on the page.  This is a real shame as if had just had the same sprinkling of author dust that Maisie got this would have probably been a much better review.

This is not a bad book by any means but it really didn't make me want to reach for the other Cornish Isles books.  If you enjoy the genre (as I do) then I would say give it a go - just because I didn't thrill to it doesn't mean you won't and a lot of people seem to disagree with this reviewer about this one.