Christmas at the Island Hotel (by Jenny Colgan)

(Amazon UK link)

I always seem to have mixed feelings about novels by Jenny Colgan. I’ve read several and a friend remarked that I have quite a collection, given that I’m not a huge fan of her writing. And I keep putting more of them on my wishlist. I was given ‘Christmas at the Island Hotel’ last Christmas. Although it’s not remotely seasonally appropriate, I decided to read it over the past few days.

The reason I wanted this book is that it’s part of a series about some people who live on the (fictional) island of Mure, in the Scottish Highlands. I didn’t read the first two books, and that didn’t much matter, but I quite liked ‘Endless Beach’, and ‘An Island Christmas’, which I read in August 2020. The characters were not particularly memorable, but there were some quite interesting subplots and I was intrigued to know how it would continue.

When I started ‘Christmas at the Island Hotel’, I did mostly recall, vaguely, some of the story from the previous book. It helps that there’s a MacKenzie family tree at the beginning, followed by a list of all the other characters. Mure is a small island and everyone knows everyone else. However although the MacKenzie family still feature significantly, they’re not really the main focus of the book.

Instead the story revolves around the opening of ‘The Rock’, a hotel bequeathed to Finton MacKenzie by his deceased husband. Finton is mourning and really doesn’t want to run a hotel, so his sister Flora starts to get involved. Flora is technically on maternity leave from her work running a cafe, but although she loves baby Douglas, she finds it very frustrating and somewhat tedious being at home with him. Her partner Joel, by contrast, seems absolutely besotted and takes to fatherhood easily.

But these are really side stories. The Rock has to employ some new staff, including a chef - and they get the temperamental Gaspard, a French chef who shouts, swears and smokes, but is a superb cook. One of Flora’s former staff, Isla, also goes to work there, and there’s a new kitchen boy called Konstantin, from Norway - but the reader knows (though nobody on Mure does) that he’s from a wealthy family in the nobility, banished by his father because he’s such a lazy, arrogant and rather useless playboy.

The style of writing is very informal, and once again I wished there had been a bit more editing. Some sentences are so convoluted I had to read them two or three times to make sense of them. There are some stream-of-consciousness passages, where a character's thoughts spill out, and that mostly works, but in other places I’d have preferred shorter sentences. There are a handful of literary references, too, which is fine, although I was irritated at mention of Edward (rather than Edmund) and turkish delight. An editor should have spotted that mistake.

In the first half of the book, I began wondering why I’d asked for yet another book by this author. I didn’t much like any of the characters, who all seem rather two-dimensional and caricatured (particularly Gaspard), and I found the frequent viewpoint-switching annoying - sometimes several times in just one scene. And yet… as happens with all the Jenny Colgan books I’ve read, around the half-way mark I realised I was interested in the storylines, and intrigued to know what would happen.

I don’t like the assumption that people are going to leap into bed at the first hint of attraction - it’s not something I’ve been aware of in any of my circles of friends and acquaintances, and there seems to be rather a lot of it in this book, albeit (thankfully) without any intimate details. The fact that everyone seems to do this in the book is another aspect of two-dimensionalism, and adds little to the story.

But there are some good subplots too - will Dr Saif ever find out whether his long-lost wife is still alive…? Will Flora find the right balance between motherhood and work? Will Konstantin learn to wash pots and peel potatoes…? Will the spoiled and obnoxious five-year-old Agot stop yelling, and start feeling a bit of empathy for others…? And what will happen to the new, huge and unexpected Christmas decoration?

Most of these questions are answered, and the ending is, on the whole, satisfactory. By the time I had finished, I liked it rather more than I thought I would, although I don’t think I’ll be looking for the next book in the series (unless I find it in a charity shop or church book sale…). Recommended in a low-key way as light holiday reading, particularly if you've read some of the earlier books in the series.

Review copyright 2022 Sue's Book Reviews