Books Read: Jenny Colgan - Welcome to Rosie Hopkin's Sweet Shop of Dreams

Source - Received from publisher to review

Rosie Hopkins thinks leaving her busy London life, and her boyfriend Gerard, to sort out her elderly Aunt Lilian's sweetshop in a small country village is going to be dull. Boy, is she wrong.

Lilian Hopkins has spent her life running Lipton's sweetshop, through wartime and family feuds. As she struggles with the idea that it might finally be time to settle up, she also wrestles with the secret history hidden behind the jars of beautifully coloured sweets.

Over the years I've read all the books that Jenny Colgan has written so I’d been eagerly awaiting the release of this book and I definitely wasn't disappointed.

When Rosie Hopkins gets a phone call from her mother asking her to go to Lipton to help her elderly aunt Lilian recuperate, sort out the sale of her sweet shop and settle her into a nursing home, she doesn't really want to go as her life is in London with her boyfriend Gerard and her temp auxiliary nursing job. 

But if she thought life in the country would be boring she’s in for a rude awakening.  Within days of her arrival she is soon assisting the local doctor to operate on a dog, playing nursemaid to the village recluse, at loggerheads with the local dentist and is the talk of the village.

Whilst taking a look around the sweet shop she envisages what it must have been like in its heyday and soon sets out to get it in ship shape condition ready to be sold as a going concern ... but instead she soon finds herself falling in love with the idea of re-opening the shop. 

Throughout the book we also get to see flashbacks that Lilian has as to what life was like for her during the war which helps to explain why she was running the shop on her own until she could no longer manage.  Each chapter also begins with a history of some of the sweets that used to be on sale in the shop and I dare you to read this book without going out and buying some of these sweets ;0) 

Although there are plenty of likeable characters within this book especially Rosie and Lilian, I have to confess I didn’t take to Rosie’s boyfriend Gerard at all especially with the way he treated her.

I whizzed through this book in no time at all and was sad for it to come to an end.... but I was excited to see that at the back of the book there was an advert for her next book,  Christmas at the Cupcake Cafe, due out in October which has already been added to my Amazon wishlist.  This is a sequel to Meet Me at The Cupcake Cafe which was one of my favourite books that I read last year. 

 Thank you to Little Brown Book Group for sending me a copy of this book to review.