
A Bookshop Christmas
Rachel Burton
Aria Books
2021, 416p
Read via my local library/Hoopla
Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}: A snowstorm. A stranger. A spark. And it’s Christmas! It should be the perfect start to the perfect love story.
But real life is far messier and more complicated than in the pages of the books in Megan Taylor’s family bookshop – the last few years have left this young widow in no doubt of that. Moving back home to York should have been a fresh start, but all it did was allow her to retreat from the world.
When prize-winning author Xander Stone rams his supermarket trolley into her ankles and then trashes her taste in books, Megan is abruptly awoken from her self-imposed hibernation. It’s time to start living again, and she’s going to start by putting this arrogant, superior – admittedly sexy – stranger in his place.
Just as she is beginning to enjoy life again, the worst happens and Megan begins to wonder if she should have stayed hidden away. Because it turns out that falling in love again is about more than just meeting under the mistletoe…
After reading a previous Rachel Burton book, The Tea Room On The Bay and really enjoying it, I was keen to read more, especially this one which is centred around a bookshop! After reading a pretty heavy book, this was my first option for the next read. I did enjoy this – but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did the previous book I read by this author.
I loved the setting and I felt like the story did a great job of highlighting the problems that come with running an independent, family owned bookstore. It’s been in Megan’s family for generations – her grandparents owned it and then her father took it over. He didn’t show much interest in it and left, and since then Megan’s mother has mostly run it with some paid staff. Three years ago Megan suffered a devastating loss, sold her London flat and moved home and has been working in the bookstore ever since, taking over the bulk of the day to day running, leaving her mother to write her popular historical fiction serial. Somehow the bookshop has managed to secure the launch of a new book for a very popular author and it could just revitalise it.
Unfortunately the author is the reason I didn’t love this one much. Xander is a really abrasive person who definitely gets off on the wrong foot with Megan. I get that he is nervous and anxious about the launch but he constantly takes it out on her and then denigrates her reading tastes as well. Megan enjoys romance novels and she and several of her friends have a bookclub where they only read and discuss romances. It’s the sort of typical highbrow literary opinion of romance that’s tedious to read.
And look – the author was doing a thing here and I get it. Xander was very much ‘the dude does protest too much’ and you find out later in the book (it’s pretty easy to guess actually) why he does that. But it honestly doesn’t make it any less tedious to read. Xander is very abrupt and quite prickly and I didn’t warm to him at all, even after we get to know him a bit better. I didn’t see Megan’s attraction to him after their first few interactions and throughout the book, I never ‘got it’. Especially after Megan inadvertently discovers his secret (due to Xander’s own actions) and the ways in which he reacts definitely gave me the feeling of red flags. And then I think there’s an attempt at a grand romantic gesture, because Megan loves Persuasion by Jane Austen (who doesn’t?) but for me, it 100% did not come off. I also found the situation with the bookshop employee quite poorly handled (both by Megan and in the book in general).
So for me, this was a mixed bag. I really liked Megan and I loved the portrayal of the bookshop, especially that it wasn’t sunshine and roses and that it was struggling and that they were going to have to make hard decisions. I enjoyed Megan’s friends for the most part and the situation with her parents was quite interesting and definitely threw up some unexpected twists. I thought the exploration of Megan’s grief was also really well done and for me, took up just the right amount of time in the story. And I loved the devotion to romance books (many are name checked in this, including ones that Megan gets Xander to read in an attempt to change his mind about them).
So it’s unfortunate that Xander as a character just didn’t work for me at all. I usually like a grumpy meet cute but I found that the more I got to know Xander the worse he became. I found a lot of his behaviour quite problematic and just didn’t understand why Megan was so interested in him when he’d been quite rude and abrupt to her and basically insulted her taste in books. He was good looking and supposedly an excellent writer but for me, that’s not enough, especially when he seems quite deliberately antagonistic about things she cares about. It’s in a “I am hiding a secret so of course I must immediately shit all over something lest anyone suspect”. Dude. No one would’ve suspected, except for all of that posturing. And then when his secret is out, he blames Megan in horrible ways and then bottles out of a proper apology. Big no.
Disappointing in that regard. However I did love a glimpse of Ellie and Ben!
6/10
Book #83 of 2022





















