I picked up Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweet Shop of Dreams at the annual Norwegian bookblogger meetup last year and finally read it before Christmas. I then promptly ordered Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweet Shop of Dreams, which arrived in time for the holidays, but I didn’t get around to it until the new year. It didn’t really matter, though the book is christmassy enough. There’s a third book in the series, which I will be ordering, which also has Christmas in the title. I might save that for December. Then again, I might not, because I’d rather like to know what happens to Rosie next.
You can probably gather from all that that I rather enjoyed the books. And I did, to the extent of staying up much later than planned in order to finish them in both cases. Granted, they are mostly fluff, but they are an appealing sort of fluff. And though some of the fundamentals seem a bit over-tired (the agonizing over whether or not He will propose in the second one, for example), Jenny Colgan avoids most of the worst pit-falls. True, Rosie is hopelessly unequipped clothes-wise for the country and there is a rather disastrous attempt at riding a bike, but she is also demonstrably capable of handling a crisis (stepping in to assist in an operation on a dog) and learns to handle the bike fast enough once given the chance. To be fair, the bike-thing also serves a more important purpose in highlighting the difference between growing up under-priveleged in the big city versus in a small community in the country, and is not just a «oh, look at this helpless city female trying to survive in the rough, masquline ruralness» which we often get.
I hardly ever read chicklit anymore, but I’m glad I made an exception for Rosie Hopkins and her sweet shop.