But after last Christmas revealed a shocking family secret, Scarlett’s hardly feeling merry and bright. All she wants this Christmas is to know who her real father is.
So Scarlett heads to the little Cornish town of Porthmellow, where she believes the truth of her birth is hidden. She just didn’t bargain on being drawn into the Christmas festival preparations – or meeting Jude Penberth, whose charm threatens to complicate life further.
Everything will come to a head at Porthmellow’s Christmas Festival … But can Scarlett have the perfect Christmas this year, or are there more surprises on the way?
Many thanks to Avon via NetGalley for my copy of A Perfect Cornish Christmas to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.
A Perfect Cornish Christmas is the second book in a planned series from Phillipa Ashley set in the Cornish coastal village of Porthmellow. Whereas book one followed the village during their preparations for the annual Summer festival now the attention turns to the Winter Solstice festival and the run up to the Christmas period. I thought this story would be a direct continuation following on from where we had left off in the previous book and also continuing to follow the same characters. Instead I was given the complete opposite with new characters being introduced with a very interesting storyline running through the entire book.
I was glad this was a totally new story as I felt enough had been written about the previous characters and, likeable enough as they were, some new faces would bring an extra dimension to the series. The storyline of book one was summed up perfectly in one or two sentences which means that this is easily read as a standalone book. Yes old familiar faces do make appearances every now and again but at the heart of this book are sisters Ellie and Scarlett who do have an awful lot to deal with and any hopes of a perfect Cornish Christmas as the title suggests do for the majority of the novel seem very far from their reach.
Christmas Day 2018 and for Scarlett Latham and her family settling down in Seaholly Manor, as left to sister Ellie by their Great Aunt, should be a time for family, celebrating and thanksgiving. But things go horribly pear shaped when Scarlett and Ellie present the findings of a DNA test they commissioned to discover if they do have Viking heritage as always claimed by their Dad Roger. Innocently, enough the sisters thought this would be a lovely surprise for everyone. Little did they realise the surprise Scarlett was going to get when the results show that Roger couldn't possibly be Scarlett's Dad. Chaos ensues with a family torn apart and fractured and with Anna their mother refusing to divulge any details preferring to bury her head in the stand full of denial that anything they suspect to have happened could ever have done so.
Scarlett flees to the Smuggler's Inn and is embraced by the locals in her bedraggled state at their Christmas Dinner for the lonely. She meets Troy and Evie, Jude, Sam and some others but the question remains, will a reconciliation with her family ever be possible? Will her parents marriage survive the revelations? Can Scarlett discover who is her real father? So many more questions rush through her mind and over the course of this book, many are answered but many more arise and it all makes for an interesting and engaging story.
Fast forward to a year later and Scarlett has decided to move permanently to Porthmellow to live at the manor with Ellie. She is still getting over a break up in her recent past and is very wary of getting involved with anyone else. Her work is freelance as she is in the copy writing business so she feels she can get some new business in a different setting. But behind it all Scarlett has ulterior motives in that she has a gut feeling that her Dad was from Porthmellow given some clues she has picked up on now she knows the way things really stand. She hopes to find out more and to discover what happened with her mother all those years ago that she betrayed her husband in that way. I loved both Scarlett and Ellie as characters and I felt there was real raw emotion and depth behind both their stories and it was brilliant to see Phillipa Ashley dealing with some real serious issues. The storylines didn't seem far fetched at all in the slightest and they were nicely balanced with lots of humour and of course romance.
Scarlett meets Jude who is so in tune with nature and his surroundings. He shows her a different side to Porthmellow and the coast as he takes her foraging and also sea swimming in the dead of winter. Instantly you could see the connection developing between the two but you wondered would Scarlett ever give in to it given she had the trauma of a break up to deal with plus she had her sights set on uncovering the truth behind her parentage.
Jude just seemed so down to earth and genuinely just such a lovely man with not a bad bone in his body. His intentions were always so real and honest that when a surprise surrounding Jude makes itself known I thought well fair play the author really threw me off course just as much as the surprise had Scarlett forming totally different opinions about the man she thought she had been getting to know. The romance angle for Scarlett combined with her quest to seek the truth all played out very well over the course of the book and I found myself enjoying the story immensely not really expecting so many twists and turns but pleasantly surprised and intrigued when they sprung up.
As for Ellie, the poor girl, she was hiding a lot in her past and putting on a brave face and always moving forward yet the events of the past couldn't be erased from her heart and mind. She is used to drifting from place to place and from one relationship to another so when she starts getting attached and perhaps too comfortable in Porthmellow she begins to wonder is this where she is meant to be? If so can she find someone that can slot into that gap in her heart that has been there for far too long. Long time residents of the village Evie and Troy have just had their son arrive back to the village after serving in the army. Aaron and Ellie meet after a bump in the road so to speak and introduce themselves to one another.
Again as with Scarlett and Jude you can feel the connection between the pair but at the same time the further we get to know Aaron you come to understand that he too is hiding something just like Ellie. But really they seemed like the perfect match if they could overcome the issues that begin to arise and simmer between them. Aaron as with Jude I felt was so just genuine, charming and down to earth. There was no fancy ways about either of the men, what you saw was what you got and there was no nastiness or double crossing ways about them. The author really had created the perfect male leads without them twee and overly sentimental. They were like men that you could meet in the real world and want to be with them.
A Perfect Cornish Christmas was a very enjoyable read and in all honesty I thought it was so much better than book one. Narrowing the focus to two specific characters and their family and subsequently their developing relationships was so much better as there was just too much confusion in the first book with so many characters to keep track of and the plot just felt very busy. Here everything was more narrow and it didn't feel as if things were going off in unnecessary tangents. Yes the preparations for the Winter Solstice Festival took a back seat but that didn't bother me in the slightest as I was more focused on the emotional stories developing around Scarlett and Ellie. When the time was right the festival did come to the fore and it provided the centre point for the tying of threads together but also for long held secrets to come to the fore.
I thought at one stage bravo Phillipa I never expected those revelations and it was almost as if she was taking a walk on the wild side having things being so tangled and complicated. It was something that made me really stop and think and it was a turn up for the books because the cover suggests all sweetness and light but the revelations don't always turn out that way. I would definitely recommend A Perfect Cornish Christmas, it has just the right flavour of Christmas to it combined with a very good storyline centred around romance and family secrets that will keep you turning the pages. Scarlett and Ellie are interesting characters that have you hoping that they will find the answers and happiness they seek.
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