Breakaway Books

Authored by Jenny Colgan; Published 2011; Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

If ever I have read a book designed for book lovers, The Christmas Bookshop is it. Yes, it is technically a romance, but it feels more like a narrative cover to allow all of us to live vicariously through the heroine as she embraces the beautiful bookish life that we all want. 

In The Christmas Bookshop, Carmen, recently fired from her department store gig, is offered both employment and lodging by her perfectionist sister Sofia. As Sofia prepares to give birth to her fourth child, Carmen is tasked with taking care of the first three children and rehabilitating the bookstore of one of Sofia’s elderly clients. Despite the sisters’ historically tense relationship, Carmen finds herself falling in love with Edinburgh and the life she finds with her sister’s family. 

There’s so much to love in this book. First and foremost, Carmen’s love interest is a Quaker dendrologist from Brazil. I dare you to find any other novel with such a unique male main character—their conversations are philosophical and touching, real in a way that I did not expect from an ordinary romance. But Carmen’s other relationships very nearly outshine this one: Her burgeoning relationships with her nieces and nephew are nothing short of adorable; the bookseller she works for is a befuddled but charming older man; even the fellow shop owners around them form a lovely community. 

But what gave me the most joy reading this book was imagining myself in Carmen’s place, finding a shop stuffed with beautiful old books and being charged to make it profitable. Putting aside the somewhat depressing reality of the economics of bookstores, this is how I would like to spend my day. While the more villainous characters (cue a pandering self-help author who seems to lack any form of moral compass) did manage to get under my skin, I found that it was always well-balanced with the relaxing time I got to spend in that beautiful bookshop.

If you are a book lover, save this one for your next holiday season binge. You won’t regret it.