The Little Village Christmas | Sue Moorcroft #bookreview @SueMoorcroft @AvonBooksUK #TLVC

Published by Avon Books

2 November 2017

available in ebook and paperback

368 pages

|   About the Book   |

Alexia Kennedy – interior decorator extraordinaire – has been tasked with giving the little village of Middledip the community café it’s always dreamed of.

After months of fundraising, the villagers can’t wait to see work get started – but disaster strikes when every last penny is stolen. With Middledip up in arms at how this could have happened, Alexia feels ready to admit defeat.

But help comes in an unlikely form when woodsman, Ben Hardaker and his rescue owl Barney, arrive on the scene. Another lost soul who’s hit rock bottom, Ben and Alexia make an unlikely partnership.

However, they soon realise that a little sprinkling of Christmas magic might just help to bring this village – and their lives – together again…

 

 * * * *

It’s been a long time since I first visited the village of Middledip but yay, we’re back there with The Little Village Christmas.  Although I must say that, despite the title, you don’t have to be surrounded by tinsel to enjoy it as the story focuses on the weeks leading up to Christmas and not just the festive period itself.

Reading a Sue Moorcroft book is like getting a big book hug.  You can always be sure of delightful locations, engaging characters, hot male leads and a little bit of romantic raunchiness.

Interior decorator Alexia is tasked with renovating The Angel Inn into a community cafe.  The villagers have chipped in with fundraising and everything is on course for work to start until some despicable people strip the Inn of its valuable assets, and do a runner with all the funds.  Instead of just forgetting the whole thing, Alexia and Gabe, the owner of the building, try to continue with the work, albeit with much scaling down and a lot of Freecyling.  However, will they be able to pull it off in time for the already promised grand re-opening at Christmas?

There are so many fabulous personalities here – Alexia – independent and feisty by nature and hoping to use these renovation works as a stepping stone to better things. Ben – the brooding nephew of Gabe, Carola, who was a force to be reckoned with and there is one non-human character that stole my heart – Barney the baby owl.  Ben was in charge of looking after Barney, who with his broken wing would never fly properly in the wild again – how can you not love a man who tenderly cares for an injured baby owl!  I have to admit I wasn’t feeling the love for Jodie, Alexia’s old friend and housemate, she just irritated me beyond belief but that may just be me being old and grumpy.

I loved the ‘will they/won’t they’ storyline between Alexia and Ben.  Sue Moorcroft certainly knows how to give her characters personality and Ben was a complex and troubled character – trying to get over a past relationship – oh boy, that one was complicated (and I was dying to know what the mystery was there) whilst figuring out how he felt about Alexia.

This is a lovely heartwarming story and one to be recommended.  At the time of writing, The Little Village Christmas is available to download from Amazon for just 99p – not to be missed for that price.

My thanks to Avon for the copy to review.

|   About the author   |

Sue Moorcroft is a Sunday Times bestselling author, a bestseller in Germany and has held the #1 spot in the UK Kindle chart. She writes women’s contemporary fiction with sometimes unexpected themes.

Sue has won a Best Romantic Read Award, been nominated for a RoNA and is a Katie Fforde Bursary winner. She also writes short stories, serials, articles, columns, courses and writing ‘how to’.

An army child, Sue was born in Germany then lived in Cyprus, Malta and the UK. She’s worked in a bank, as a bookkeeper (probably a mistake), as a copytaker for Motor Cycle News and for a digital prepress. She’s pleased to have now wriggled out of all ‘proper jobs’.

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