Christmas at the Island Hotel by Jenny Colgan follows Christmas on the Island, and I was glad I read both books in succession, because this novel picks up one year later, and I already had all the backstories fresh in my memory.
I didn’t care for Christmas on the Island, and after I got through this one I could only shake my head and be glad I was done with both of them, for the island theme made one dud of a series. The 344 pages are divided into 74 chapters, which means that action is not given much of a chance to develop before a new chapter appears. As I was reading I felt as if I was just turning pages since nothing seemed to be happening. Thus I was totally unprepared for the sudden passion expressed between the hotel owner Fintan and the chef, Gaspard. They weren’t the only characters who were wholly unbelievable. Aside from Gaspard’s annoying French accent where his dialogue is stretched out with phonetic Eet ees for It is, meedle for middle and thees for this, five-year-old Agot, who talked like an autistic preteen with a speech impediment in the earlier novel, now acts like a bossy prima donna adult who suddenly speaks in complete sentences. Agot was never a welcoming character in either novel and she made the read a loathsome experience.
The novel centres on the hotel Fintan inherited from his late husband Colton. The place is being readied for a grand opening one year after Colton’s death, and the last-minute preparations include several disastrous trial runs with dinners for the local population. Unbeknownst to the hotel staff, they have a young Norwegian royal in their midst. Konstantin Pederson is the son of a duke, who has been banished from his country because he’s an all-around slacker who has gotten on his father’s nerves too many times. Konstantin finds himself among the kitchen staff at the hotel, and things get pretty bloody when he finds he has to do food prep with knives.
Romance develops between Konstantin and Isla, another member of the kitchen staff. Flora and Joel have their baby, Douglas, and Joel is no longer afraid of commitment and proposes. And Dr. Saif Hassan is still madly attracted to Lorna, yet discovers that his wife back in Syria may now be married to another man and could have already had a baby with him. The news about his wife, who may have been forced into a marriage without divorcing Saif first, means that a follow-up novel is a must. There are too many unknowns in the Saif saga and I am interested in finding out the truth about his marriage. I will read the next book in the series, with Agot and all.
Colgan wrote a few lines that aroused a snicker, such as this comment on a friend’s dress:
“Pam was wearing a bright purple satin dress with puffed sleeves. Flora thought she looked like a Quality Street candy tin, but kept it to herself as Pam swept in to see Joel.”
and this line about the late Colton, who was not born in Scotland:
“They’d tried to block his hotel about four times and dumped a wind farm in the full sight line of his house just because they found him American and annoying.”
But Colgan got the tense wrong with this short sentence. How I hate reading errors such as this involving the erroneous use of the conditional past:
“She wished her mother would have come.”
Why do authors make this so complicated for themselves? The sentence should simply be “She wished her mother had come.”