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Carmen has always been the younger sister who doesn’t measure up. She didn’t go to college and works in a department store and is single at nearly 30. Her older sister, Sofia, is a lawyer married to an international lawyer and has a gorgeous home in Edinburgh and three children. She’s even pregnant with a fourth.
Then the department store in her small industrial town closes and Carmen’s left without work and income. So her mother persuades her to go live with Sofia and help out while Sofia’s husband is gone for the month. Then Sofia persuades Carmen to work in a client’s bookstore. The client is facing having to sell his shop, and even that can only happen if he can have a successful Christmas season.
Carmen finds herself in an old building, stuffed with old books in no particular order, that’s definitely unappealing and gets hardly any customers. So she takes things in hand and persuades Mr. McCredie to let her make some changes, including selling charming children’s stories and holiday books, decorating and doing story time.
She starts to enjoy her time at the shop and is proud of the good things happening because of her improvements. Now if things were only that simple with both her love life and her living situation. It’s always been hard having to visit perfect Sofia. Now she has to live with her, and her pretty, blond young nanny who insists everyone eat healthy. And then there are the three children. She doesn’t know the first thing about kids.
At the store, Carmen meets two men who couldn’t be more different. One is Blair, a handsome best-selling author of platitude-laden self-help books. He does a signing at the bookstore and then gets stuck in town thanks to a snowstorm. He leans on Carmen for help and shows interest in her. But he’s so superficial. The other man is tree specialist Oke, a Brazilian who’s lecturing for a semester at the university. He’s a Quaker, quiet and down to earth. She likes the attention from Blair, who’s rich and famous. But she likes Oke. She just doesn’t know if he is at all interested in her.
There are plenty of questions in the story: Will Carmen’s work in just a short time be enough to save the shop? Will Carmen be able to build a better relationship with her sister? Will she find satisfaction in her life and find a measure of success for herself? Will she find love, and with whom?
The answers to these questions are fairly easy to figure out because The Christmas Bookshop is just one of those kinds of stories. But it’s a pleasant and heartwarming one, just the kind of satisfying holiday book to get into the Christmas spirit. I enjoyed armchair traveling to Edinburgh and reading the descriptions of the old city where the shop is located. And the ways that Carmen spruced up the shop were charming and made it all so inviting. I didn’t like the whole Blair plot thread; he just seemed so outlandish, a caricature. For me, it didn’t fit into the rest of the story, which was cozy and solid. Even so, I found this book about family and love a pleasant pick for this time of year.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 13 uses of strong language, about 10 instances of moderate profanity, a dozen uses of mild language, and about 70 instances of the name of Deity in vain. The book is set in Scotland and has almost 40 uses of British profanity. Sexual content includes some kissing and talk about the idea of sex, as well as a brief story about a woman in the past who had an affair.
