The Cafe by the Sea: A Women's Fiction Novel

I seem to be reading this series out of order, but that's okay. I am still enjoying the story. This first volume introduces the reader to Flora Mackenzie and her family as she returns to her home on the fictional but fascinating island of Mure. The island is a character itself in the story - slow-paced lifestyle, dark constantly in the winter and light constantly in the summer, no trees due to the winds, small population that keeps everyone involved in each other's lives. The author still uses "blinking" too much to convey confusion in her characters, which gets tiresome after a while, but I really enjoy the books and highly recommend them.

Bottom line: Better than a few, worse than many. This romance is inoffensive, forgettable, not very believable, and light on romance, but otherwise it is not bad. The premise is that Flora who has been living in London and working as a paralegal is sent back to her remote childhood home on the Island of Mure north of Scotland to wait to be summoned by a wealthy new client. The client belongs to her boss. Flora has a huge crush on her boss who is ill-tempered and inconsiderate. He, of course, does not know her name. The most interesting thing about the book is the remote island setting. It is billed as beautiful and heralded as a destination for the well-heeled once the posh hotel is finished. You just have to take the author’s word for it because with the abysmal weather and remote location, it is a stretch even with the quiet and clean air. While Flora is waiting for the client (and promoting his project plans with the local population), she takes over an empty property and promptly launches a highly successful café. It could happen- after all she has her late mother’s recipes and the assistance of a few local teenagers back from university on the mainland. Family issues get wrapped up neatly, the romance blossoms, and the book ends. Thank goodness.

I do like the characters Jenny creates in the stories she weaves together. I feel like I have gotten to know and care about the people in her books.

I admit it. There is nothing so lovely as a fabulous run on sentence, especially when it takes on the character of what it is describing. I’m sure there is a word for that, but in my world it’s just a happy sigh. If you’ve read my rants (WHAT? You DON’T read them?) you know those pesky run on sentences creep in every once a - honestly, a lot of bits. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Well, there IS something as lovely: a full paragraph run on. It doesn’t belong in a legal brief, God knows, but there is a time and a place! So here it is. Imagine flying into Heathrow and seeing the city below as if on Google Maps. And you zoom in further and further....If you carry on down farther, it would pretty soon stop looking so serene, less as if you were surveying it like a god in the sky, and you’d start to notice how crowded everything is and how grubby it all looks, and how many people are shoving past each other, even now, when it’s not long past 7 A.M., exhausted-looking cleaners who’ve just finished their dawn shifts trudging home in the opposite direction from the eager suited and booted young men and women; office jockeys and retail staff and mobile phone fixers and Uber drivers and window cleaners and Big Issue sellers and the many, many men wearing hi-vis vests who do mysterious things with traffic cones; and we’re nearly at ground level now, whizzing round corners, following the path of the Docklands Light Railway, with its passengers trying to hold their own against the early-morning crush, because there is no way around it, you have to stick your elbows out, otherwise you won’t get a place, might not even get to stand: the idea of possibly getting a seat stops miles back at Gallions Reach, but you might, you might just get a corner place to stand that isn’t pressed up against somebody’s armpit, the carriage thick with coffee and hungover breath and halitosis and the sense that everyone has been somehow ripped from their beds too soon, that even the watery sunlight tilting over the horizon in this early spring isn’t entirely convinced about it, but tough, because the great machine of London is all ready and waiting, hungry, always hungry, to swallow you up, squeeze everything it can out of you and send you back to do the entire thing in reverse.fromThe Cafe By the Sea: A NovelBy Jenny ColganSigh. A thing of beauty. Thank you Jenny and thank you Jenny’s editors.

This is a story about mixed up family a lady paralegal and the downfall of a Scottish community which did not want to make changes which resulted the cafe by the sea and all the bakery. Not sure if ending was happy. Long storu

Flora is accused of being a selkie, those mythical seal-people of Scotland. However, when the story begins, she's out of her element in London, which Colgan always paints as hot and stinky and noisy. When Joel, Flora's boss at the law firm, directs her to go home to her island village in Scotland and help a client with a project, Flora's original world clashes with the new. And she's in love with Joel, a hopeless fantasy that'll never amount to anything because he's a bad boy, a player with no feelings, a master of the universe. It's only when she goes home and reunites with her estranged family of widowed father and angry brothers that Flora is able to find peace. She restores a café using her mother's beloved recipes. The client falls in love with the island and sets himself to help the local economy, the brothers resolve their issues, and Flora and Joel come together.This is a pretty good story, with good underlying issues creating tension. Flora has to accept she's unique and valuable, which is a relatable theme. As with her other books, Colgan lifts us up with descriptions of the culture (the dance!) and the setting (great depiction of changeable weather and risk, also northern lights). However, it's not as smoothly written as her Bookstore series, which was my introduction to her works. Flora's emotions jerk back and forth, some segues would be helpful, and I felt Joel wasn't compelling although he could have been. This feels like an earlier work, but the pub date is same as Bookstore series. Still, a good read.

A young woman working in London has to assist with legal work on her home island in Scotland in order to land an important client for the firm.

A typical Jenny book, love it

I enjoyed this book

Very good. Jenny colgan at her best

I found this book disappointing on multiple levels. Just totally did not like the way it played out at all. Could not believe they let the family farm go....something that would happen over my dead body. And as a country girl, just about the last guy on earth I would end up with is a sissy city boy. My list could go on to even more disappointing bits but this will do . I disliked this book enough to take Jenny Colgan off my favorites list and not pre-purchase any more of her books.

Jenny coltan captures your imagination instantly. Her stories are compelling because she creates characters that you care about and settings that fascinate.