The Cotswold Christmas Bookshop Review: Pure Holiday Comfort Reading

 

I absolutely loved The Cotswold Christmas Bookshop. Once I started, I barely paused for meal breaks until I reached the end, which is generally a very good indication that a book has me firmly in its clutches. This is pure women’s fiction with a warm romance at its heart. It’s kind of story where you know exactly how it’s going to end fairly early on, but you keep reading anyway because getting there is such fun. This was my first book by this author, and I was positively thrilled to discover that she has written plenty of others for me to immediately add to my reading list. Having visited the Cotswolds myself, I could picture every cozy corner of this village, and the book left me yearning for the days when independent bookshops were the heart of a community. Finch’s, with its old shelves, loyal customers, village gossip, and Heathcliff the cat (who clearly considers the humans to be his employees), practically became a character. I did have to make one small linguistic adjustment: the British use of “mooching.” Apparently it means wandering around, rather than what it means in America, where it generally refers to someone freeloading. Once I got that straight, I was perfectly happy to mooch along with the rest of them.

 After losing her fancy London publishing job, Isla returns home for Christmas without telling anyone the real reason and gradually finds herself spending more and more time at Finch’s, the bookshop where she worked as a teenager. As she helps the owners, Jon and Miriam, she discovers how much she loves the work—talking books, remembering what people loved as children, and finding exactly the right story for someone who can’t sleep. Then there’s Guy, the handsome property consultant who arrives with ideas about the shop. Isla immediately decides she doesn’t like him, but unfortunately for her, Guy refuses to behave badly enough to make that decision easy. Watching their relationship develop, particularly the anticipation surrounding their first date and Guy’s refreshing directness, was delightful. Charlie, Isla’s first love, also reappears, because apparently one attractive man is not enough to make a woman’s Christmas complicated. Meanwhile, Isla has to choose between an impressive new position heading the romance department at a major publisher and the quieter, considerably less glamorous life she is rediscovering at the bookshop.

What I loved most, though, is Isla herself. She’s hiding her redundancy, trying to save Finch’s, juggling old feelings and new ones, and insisting that she doesn’t have any big decisions to make when, in fact, she has a rather enormous one sitting right in front of her. At its heart, this is a lovely reminder that losing the impressive version of your life doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Sometimes the life that looks smaller from the outside is the one in which you finally feel useful, happy, and completely yourself. Add Christmas, snow, twinkling lights, a charming Cotswold village, a beloved bookshop, two attractive men, and one opinionated cat, and you have pretty much everything I want in a holiday read. I knew where this story was going, and I thoroughly enjoyed every single mile of the journey.

 My Rating: ★★★★★ (5 out of 5 stars)

 You can order a copy here.

 Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for providing me with an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

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