The Lemon Tree Café (by Cathy Bramley)

(Amazon UK link)

I so enjoyed the first book I read by Cathy Bramley (‘Wickham Hall’) that I put a couple of other books she had written on my wish list last year. I was delighted to be given them for my birthday this year, and have just finished reading ‘The Lemon Tree Cafe’.

The story is narrated by a young woman called Rosie. She’s clearly a person of strong principles, as we learn in the first chapter. She works for a high-powered social media company, where she’s considered an expert in some fields. But she refuses to compromise what she believes is right, and walks out of the job.

She has some savings, and expects to find another job fairly easily, as she has been head-hunted before. But first she pops into her grandmother’s village café. It’s a popular place, selling home-made light meals and cakes, as well as high quality teas and coffees. For many, it’s a focal point or meeting place.

However, the two women who work there consider that Maria, Rosie’s grandmother, is getting a bit absent-minded. She doesn’t keep proper accounts, and she has been muddling up some of the recent orders. She doesn’t notice when things need thorough cleaning, and won’t allow her assistants to stay behind after she has left.

So Rosie offers to help out for a few weeks. She knows that Maria is stubborn and resists any hint that she needs more help; she’s a feisty Italian 75-year-old who won’t acknowledge that it may be time to slow down a little…

A lot happens in the course of the month. Rosie, who clearly has a very unpleasant memory of a former relationship, meets someone she finds attractive but she keeps backing off. Maria, too, has a suitor: the elderly Stanley. But she, too, doesn’t seem to want to get too close. She won’t talk about her past either, nor does she seem to have any photos of Rosie’s grandfather.

Then the owner of a local business dies unexpectedly, and his wife is persuaded to sell at a low price. The property is taken over by a mega-store selling cheap plants, stationery and more - and is going to start a cafe, too, which is likely to rival Maria’s café. So Rosie’s social media skills are put to good use as they put up a fight to save the local village shops.

There are lots of characters, a tad too many for my liking, but apparently at least one of them had a book of her own, so it might have helped had I read that first. I mostly managed to remember who was whom; some of them are a little caricatured, but I liked Stanley very much, and also four-year-old Noah. I liked Maria, too. I wasn’t entirely sure that her somewhat stilted English is realistic after living over forty years in England, but her malapropisms are very amusing in places.

I became quite fond of Rosie too, although she’s a very different kind of person from me. But I admired the stands she took, albeit feeling that she was as stubborn as her grandmother at times…

There are some ‘issues’ covered in the book making it a little deeper than many books in the popular cafe/restaurant genre. It would be a spoiler to say what they are, other than the initial one in the first chapter when Rosie refuses to change a model’s appearance artificially. Perhaps some of them are touched on too lightly; almost as a token offering to those who expect ‘minority’ themes. But they’re mostly done sensitively.

It took me a while to get into the book. It’s pleasant light reading, somewhat informal but that isn’t too much of a problem when it’s a first person narration. However nothing really grabbed me until around half-way through, when I realised that some of the characters were getting under my skin. I wanted to know what Maria’s secret was. Rosie’s was fairly obvious, although the eventual resolution of that has an unexpected twist.

Overall, I liked it very much. As with the first book I read by Cathy Bramley, I particularly appreciated that there’s almost no bad language and no overt scenes of violence or intimacy, despite a few hints of both. The ending ties everything together perhaps a little too neatly, but I don't mind that. I want a book to have a positive ending, and for as many threads as possible to be resolved.

Recommended, if you undemanding light women’s fiction. There's a bonus of some rather tasty-looking recipes at the back, too.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's Book Reviews