Blog Tour: 'The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane' by Ellen Berry!

In the beginning…
Kitty Cartwright has always solved her problems in the kitchen. Her cookbooks are her life, and there isn’t an issue that ‘Cooking with Aspic’ can’t fix. Her only wish is that she had a book entitled ‘Rustling Up Dinner When Your Husband Has Left You’.
Forty years later…
On Rosemary Lane, Della Cartwright plans to open a very special little bookshop. Not knowing what to do with the hundreds of cookbooks her mother left her, she now wants to share their recipes with the world – and no amount of aspic will stand in her way.
But with her family convinced it’s a hare-brained scheme, Della starts to wonder if she’s made a terrible decision. One thing’s for sure: she’s about to find out…
We’re ending this week over here at Spoonful of Happy Endings in a great way, namely with the exciting blog tour for Ellen Berry’s ‘The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane’! The novel was released last week, on the 14th of July, and it’s one of this month’s releases I have been the most excited about picking up. As a big book fan, I love books about book shops, so the title of this new novel was already enough for me to want to read it (especially combined with the colourful cute cover!). I got lucky and was provided with a review copy and a spot on the tour, and I’m really excited to share my review with all of you today. Be sure to visit some of the other stops on the tour as well, you can find the links on the blog tour banner below!
Della Cartwright is in search of a new project in her life, something she can focus on now her daughter Sophie has left for college and her husband Mark seems to be anywhere but home. After the recent death of her mother, Della now finds herself with her mum’s large collection of cookbooks. From French cuisine to cooking for dummies, Della’s mother had cookbooks about absolutely everything and somehow Della can’t say goodbye to this part of her mother’s inheritance. When the opportunity arises, Della decides to start her very own bookshop, specializing in only books about food and cooking, sharing her mother’s recipes with the world. However, Della still has her everyday life to deal with as well, including the worries about Sophie and Mark’s strange behaviour. Will she be able to realise her bookshop ideas or is it all just a dream she should quickly set aside…?
‘The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane’ is a simply lovely read by Ellen Berry, who is actually author Fiona Gibson, who I personally know from novels such as ‘Take Mum Out’ and ‘As Good As It Gets?’. This story has Fiona’s familiar comfortable and well-written writing style and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. Della, the main character, is at a crossroads in her life now her daughter Sophie is moving out to go to college and the relationship with her husband Mark seems to be going from bad to worse. I loved the background story of Della’s family and how her mother got into collecting cookbooks. The idea of starting a bookshop completely devoted to her mother’s collection is a wonderful one and I was really curious to read more about this.
I have to say I was a bit disappointed that the main topic of the novel wasn’t necessarily the bookshop, as I had expected mainly because of the title of the book. The story focuses more on Della and everything that’s going on in her life, which was also really interesting, but I just had to adjust my expectations a bit. I was really looking forward to reading how Della would help her customers, but I read somewhere that this is actually the first part of a trilogy, so fingers crossed we still have that to look forward to! Overall, ‘The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane’ is a charming, thoroughly enjoyable and captivating read; perfect for fans of Trisha Ashley, and a novel I can recommend to any chick lit/women’s fiction fans out there to pick up this summer!  

Rating:9/10

  For more information about this book: Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com / Goodreads
Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a review copy in exchange for an honest review.