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Jump to navigationJump to searchWelcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams by Jenny Colgan (view source)
Revision as of 08:51, 21 March 2012
, 08:51, 21 March 2012no edit summary
Jenny Colgan is one of the queens of British chick-lit and, unlike many writers in this fuzzily delineated genre, she managed to avoid the formulaic-books-from-template trap that must be very tempting for any successful writer of popular fiction. For a long time, her (very) bitter, (hilariously) funny and (not too) sweet ''Amanda's Wedding'' was my favourite chick-lit novel, and although her further novels didn't quite match up to that one (perhaps with an exception of a totally unheard-of chick-lit novel about a boy, with magic) they were always very readable, entertaining and unexpectedly touching. And so is ''Welcome to Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop of Dreams''.
This last Colgan offering is full of standard plot devices not to say clichés: a city girl coming to the countryside, a mummy's darling boyfriend who never pops the question, an intelligent child with a pushy mother (clearly a cousin of Bertie from [[The Unbearable Lightness of Scones (44 Scotland Street ) by Alexander McCall smithSmith|44 Scotland Street]] but no less an attractive a character for that), an old spinster remembering a lost love, a woman getting her life out of a rut as a side effect of a total change of scene; and so on. By rights, it should be an annoying collection of clichés. And that sweetshop, such a perfect vehicle for for nostalgia that the books could have easily been sickly-sweet and mawkishly nauseous. But it's not. Nostalgia is there all right, but the sickly-sweetness is almost entirely avoided thanks to humour, alternately down-to-earth (in the main storyline) and ironically sharp (in the excerpts from Lillian's book: ''Sweets, The User Manual'' which start each chapter).
I grew up in Poland and thus with an entirely different set of nostalgia triggers and consider many sweets referenced in ''Sweetshop of Dreams'' quite unremarkable or downright horrid, a kind of thing you must grow up with to possibly like. Despite that, or maybe because of that, I found all the candy-related material fascinating. And the clichéd – or let's just call them tried-and-tested - plot devices and characters work beautifully in creating an entertaining, charming whole in which the overall direction was entirely predictable and yet it was quite unclear how and by what twists it would develop.
