Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan started out as a curious piece of fluff, more lightweight than usual for a feel-good Christmas romance. During the first quarter of the book I wondered where the story was headed. Polly and Huckle live in a lighthouse in Cornwall, and Polly runs the Little Beach Street Bakery. Their home life seemed cartoonish especially with their pet puffin, named Neil. I was not aware that puffins could be domesticated (and my on-line research informs me that they are not ideal pets) yet since Neil was an injured bird whose life partner Celeste up and left him, Colgan has freely applied anthropomorphism to characterize the dejected Neil as a small child, dependent on his two human caregivers.
The first quarter of the story centred on their sitcom life with a puffin sidekick, and didn’t get interesting until we learned about Polly’s friend Kerensa, who is eight months pregnant. She confides in Polly that during a party she got drunk and had sex with another man. While she had been able to keep this secret to herself for almost the entire length of her pregnancy, the anxiety is killing her as the due date approaches. Kerensa is married to Reuben, a short redhead, while her one-night stand was a tall dark Brazilian stripper, so if the baby comes out with dark hair and complexion, she will have to find a way to explain this to her husband. I liked this part of the story, as Colgan was able to portray the mental anguish that Kerensa was feeling, unsure if her marriage would even exist anymore once the baby was born.
Polly is a superwoman who works overtime at her bakery during Christmastime. Her emotional life is stretched to extremes, with Kerensa needing her support while her fiancé Huckle feels that ever since his marriage proposal Polly has had other things to preoccupy her mind. He feels ignored and that perhaps Polly has no interest in marrying him at all.
If Polly’s fragile emotional state couldn’t be tested any further, suddenly, after thirty years, she discovers her birth father who is on his deathbed (and, conveniently, staying at a hospital not far from where she lives). The weight of all these personal issues would crush anyone at any time of year, yet Polly can deal with them all by concentrating on her work and making sure the town has its share of cookies and tarts.
Christmas romances mean happy endings so you can guess who turns out to be the father of Kerensa’s baby (and no one needed to do a DNA test to prove it). The novel ends with a surprise wedding between Polly and Huckle. The whole town conspired to put the ceremony together. It helps when Reuben is filthy rich and can order–rather, command–anything he wants on a whim.
Colgan knew Cornwall from her own visits to the area and her perceptions of the sea, its tides and weather seemed authentic. The winter temperature in the lighthouse was often freezing, and throughout the novel Colgan succeeded in making me feel a chill each time I stepped inside the tall cylindrical icebox:
“She experimentally stretched her foot out of the bed. The cold air felt sharp, like a knife. She hoped they weren’t going to get ice on the inside of the windows again. Neil had tried to sleep in the fireplace.”
I noticed a linguistic error early in the novel when Colgan, in another of her lengthy paragraph-long single sentences, wrote:
“…and the jam tarts for the old ladies who had lived here all their lives, whose voices had the low hum and musical cadence local to the region, whose own grandparents had spoken Cornish…”
Since Cornish as an everyday language died out in the late eighteenth century, these old ladies’ grandparents would not have spoken the language.