Love And Lies At The Village Christmas Shop by Portia MacIntosh

3.5 Stars

I was actually quite charmed by this tale, once I settled in to it and couldn't understand why some of the peripheral characters felt so familiar.  I knew that Ivy was new to me, and her twin Holly, but something had the vaguest twinge of deja vu to it.  Then I realised we have been transported to Marram Bay before, but a very different Marram Bay to this rather isolated location.  I could get on board with an all year round Christmas Shop and I know they do exist but to have one so far outside the village seemed to defeat the purpose of a retail outlet and to find it struggling was no real surprise.  To be entirely honest the whole trying to save the shop from the charming developer plot left me cold (and not in a festive way).

What did save this book for me was the characters that inhabited it.  From a devious Santa, to a stay-at-home mum with worries about her future and her family to the grieving daughter who has never really covered from the loss of her mother.  Every character, no matter how brief their appearance on the page, has a fully rounded personality that the author manages to coax out with few words.  The residents of Marram Bay feel wholly real and as complex as any person you really know, some of them are even rather unlikeable.

The plot itself is rather predictable but there is no miraculous saviour for the Village Christmas Shop and a modicum of reality is held on to by the author.  Despite managing to give you that warm feeling of a happy ending it is only really happy-ish as a dollop of the real world is allowed to intrude in to the way things work out.  Only a dollop though, after all this is fiction and we demand our happily-ever-after.

A fun, solid read that is more about the people than the plot.