There are some stream-of-consciousness passages, where a character's thoughts spill out, and that mostly works, but in other places I’d have preferred shorter sentences.

However although the MacKenzie family still feature significantly, they’re not really the main focus of the book.Habe dieses Buch als NEU gekauft, vollen Preis bezahlt und es eben grade erhalten als wäre es von einem Laster gefallen. It’s now common knowledge that one of the best tools to tackle the climate crisis is to plant trees. Finton is mourning and really doesn’t want to run a hotel, so his sister Flora starts to get involved. There's a lot of comic relief from exiled Norwegian Prince Konstantin and his faithful (farty) dog Bjark Bjarkensson who is forced to work for the very first time in his life. This charming and cosy festive story demands you switch off the TV and curl up with a mug of hot chocolate .

However, Flora has difficulty remaining still and she wants to help her brother Fintan fulfill the dying wish of his husband, Coltan, and open the Island Hotel for Christmas.Finally, the fact that all the characters seem to have no understanding of media, let alone social media, is baffling. There are a handful of literary references, too, which is fine, although I was irritated at mention of Edward (rather than Edmund) and turkish delight.

The Rock has to employ some new staff, including a chef - and they get the temperamental Gaspard, a French chef who shouts, swears and smokes, but is a superb cook. Lovely to go back to Mure and dive into this tiny Scottish island that is closer to Norway than the British coast. The Rock - the rambling, disused hotel on the tip of the island - was Colton's passion project before he died. It is still close enough to Christmas with a nip in the air, so I see no reason to stop reading Christmas stories, and this one was good fun and hit all the feels from the lows of grief and humiliation to the highs of a freshly acquired sense of purpose and pride as well as new and deepening love affairs.A cute holiday story centered around the staff at a hotel on the small (fictional) island of Mure, located halfway between Scotland and Norway. Yes, of course, there is a little romance in here, but it is not the ‘syrupy sweet’ stuff I have read in other books. It helps that there’s a MacKenzie family tree at the beginning, followed by a list of all the other characters. So badly so, that he doesn't care about the wishes of his dead hubby that he would rather just mope about and not exist within the confines of the pages of the book about his hotel. A large amount of this story features the staff working in the kitchens of The Rock, including the fiery French chef Gaspard, Isla from the Seaside Kitchen who is incredibly shy, and Konstantin who is a young Norwegian man with absolutely no life experience of anything, but has been banished to Mure to get a job.