Christmas at the Cupcake Café is the third novel I have read by Jenny Colgan. The other two centred on bookshops at Christmas, yet this one focusses on a cupcake shop in London. Issy Randall owns the Cupcake Café and business is booming especially as Christmas nears. Her boyfriend Austin, realizing his job as a banker is in jeopardy as his company is downsizing, finds employment in New York City. He is embraced by his American colleagues who are eager to hire him so they fly Issy over so she can see the city. The drama ensues when neither party wants to give up his or her career. Will Issy and Austin break up? It looks like it…and just before Christmas as well. How can we have a happy ending by Christmas?
Since the resolution of all problems by Christmas is a guarantee with feel-good novels such as this, I was pleased that Colgan wrote a story that genuinely had me wondering how she would end up doing it. Issy’s staff seemed wholly incompetent while she was in New York, which strengthened her resolve that she could never leave her business as it would flounder without her. Austin, on the other hand, had a mentally challenged younger brother, Darny, to look after. Darny caused so much trouble that his school expelled him. The only other school in the London area that would accept him had a horrid reputation. Austin’s new boss could pull a few strings and get Darny enrolled in a prime New York school geared to children with special needs. Thus a tug of war developed with each party on a different Atlantic coast. I enjoyed this novel because the happy ending was not predictable and the plans to make it happen seemed realistic.
One trait that I noted in my reviews of Colgan’s other two novels was her propensity for writing very and I mean very long sentences. It was not a pleasure to encounter any of her extended run-ons because it meant I had to reread these sentences, often multiple times, in order to grasp all that she wanted to say. I had to do that partly because the sentences, with all their parenthetical asides and dashed inserts, sometimes didn’t make grammatical sense when read altogether. If Colgan wanted to reflect a character’s befuddled or active mind and ricocheting train of thought through her writing style, I believe she still could have done so effectively by making some of her sentences even one quarter the length. I can’t believe an editor let this monstrosity pass:
“Meeting Austin, who liked the fact that she liked to please him…well, the boys had complained at first about the house–who really needed curtains anyway, Darny had said; they were just bourgeois (a word he clearly had no concept of the meaning of), about shame and a fake privacy the state didn’t even let you have–but Issy had persisted, and gradually, as the windows were cleaned, and a new kitchen table brought in (they let Darny keep the old one, covered in ink spills and old glue and that part where they’d played the knife-throwing game that time, as a desk upstairs) with a comfortable wall bench covered in cushions, and all Issy’s kitchen appliances, which she bought like other women bought shoes; lamps in the corner of the room rather than bare bulbs (Austin had complained be couldn’t see a thing until Issy had told him it was romantic and would make romantic things happen, which changed his outlook somewhat), and even cushions (which were constantly being secreted upstairs for Darny to use as target practice), the house was beginning to look really rather cozy.”
Unlike some novels I have read that market themselves as Christmas reads yet have hardly any Christmas content, this one was full of holiday sights and, with a cupcake café as a central locale, holiday scents as well. I have four more Colgan Christmas novels to read and am glad the first one I chose was a winner.