Book review: Christmas at the Cat Cafe

The Blurb

It’s the most wonderful time of the year on Castle Street, and there’s a paw-some new business opening…

It had always been Tabby’s dream to work with cats and an inheritance from her beloved nanna has finally made that a reality. Idyllic Castle Street in Whitsborough Bay couldn’t be a better place for pastry chef Tabby to open a cat café with her boyfriend, Leon.

But when Leon leaves her in the lurch, the pressure mounts for Tabby. With Christmas fast approaching, she has to open the café on her own – a daunting prospect, especially when she’s been hiding her health issues from the ones she loves.

Faced with local resistance to the café – and somebody seemingly determined that she won’t succeed – Tabby will need her friends, family and cats more than ever to recover her broken Christmas spirit and pull together for a Christmas miracle.

Will the cat café bring the festive joy to Castle Street as Tabby had hoped or will it be a cat-astrophe?

My Review

5/5

This is my favourite Jessica Redland so far and I like it because it wasn’t quite what I expected. Yes, it’s still cosy. Yes, it still has romance. Yes, it’s about a woman pursuing her dream of running a cat café and yes, there are absolutely loads of cute cats in it.

But I loved it because alongside all that, Jessica managed to inject a big dollop of real life.

Can you inject a dollop? Probably not. But anyway…

I would love to say more, but I daren’t for fear of spoilers! But what I will say is this. Even if you aren’t into cats, this book is worth reading. Yes, there are a lot of cats in it, as the title suggests, but there’s a lot of other stuff too. More than the cats themselves (dare I admit here that I’m a dog person?), I loved the café description. It sounded like the most wonderful place, and I’m not sure how Jessica Redland managed to dream it up. It certainly isn’t just an ordinary café with tables and a few cats wandering around. Far from it!

People sometimes criticise romance fiction for being predictable, and as a romance writer myself, this is something I worry about. You introduce your main characters near the beginning and as a reader, part of the fun is rooting for the pair of them to get together all the way through the book. I was certainly doing that in this book. But there were other aspects to this story that were far from predictable. I thought I knew how things would work out and I was wrong, and I loved Christmas at the Cat Cafe all the more for that.

To buy a copy of this book, please click here.

About the Author

Jessica Redland writes emotional but uplifting stories of love, friendship, family and community. Her Whitsborough Bay books transport readers to the stunning North Yorkshire Coast where she lives with her husband, daughter and sprocker spaniel. Her Hedgehog Hollow series, set in a hedgehog rescue centre, takes readers into the beautiful rolling countryside of the Yorkshire Wolds.

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