Review: The Christmas Wish by Lindsey Kelk

 Newly single lawyer Gwen Baker is hoping that a family Christmas – countryside, a mountain of food and festive films –

will salve the sting of her career hanging by a thread and her heart being trampled on. Because everyone else has their life sorted: even Dev, her boy-next-door crush, is now a tall, dark and handsome stranger with a fiancée. She can’t help wishing her future was clearer.

Then Gwen wakes up to discover it’s Christmas day all over again. Like Groundhog Day but with turkey. And family arguments. On repeat.

As she figures out how to escape her own particular Christmas hell, Dev is the one bright spot. He might be all grown-up but underneath he’s just as kind and funny as she remembers.

Maybe, just maybe, her heart can be mended after all.

But how do you fall in love with someone who can’t remember you from one day to the next?

Review: A new Lindsey Kelk book is always a treat but when it is a new Lindsey Kelk book set at Christmas following the pattern of one of my favourite films and it’s a beautiful, strokable hardback edition, that is my idea of heaven right there. This book has Kelk’s usual mix of heart and humour, real life with absurd things going wrong that you know this author has probably experienced at one time or another. You don’t have to have read any of Lindsey’s other books to enjoy this one though. Whether you are new to this author or have read all of her books multiple times, this one is for you.

Gwen is a great character to spend this book with because she is wonderfully imperfect and living in the real world like all of us. She is having a moment, an existential crisis, a journey of self-discovery and she is doing this while she is ‘home for the holidays’ because that’s the perfect time for this to happen. When I describe her in this way I know I have already sold you on this but when I add in the fact that she gets to spend Christmas day over and over and over again like Groundhog Day but she is Billy Murray, you know things can only get better. I loved going on this journey with her and seeing her grow and her mindset change over the course of the novel.

What is wonderful about living the same day over and over again is that we also get to see more of our supporting cast again and again. Gwen gets to know her long suffering mum and her slightly emotionally repressed dad a lot better over the course of the book and so we do too. It was a real treat to be disc covering these characters through the main character and I love this as a writing choice on the part of this author. We have cousin Manny and of course the matriarch of the family-Nan. They were great characters and provided some real comedy moments too.

Of course, this is a romcom and we have former crush and boy next door Dev to get to know in this novel too. The wonderful thing about Dev though, is that is isn’t always around. Because he is the boy next door and he doesn’t know that Gwen is living Christmas again and again, we get to know him again and again. He doesn’t feature in every Christmas day and so Gwen is just free to do her own thing whilst he is doing his. I loved this balance and this old friendship that the two have. It made for more ‘will they, won’t they’ moments as well as keeping the book about Gwen and not just her search for someone to ‘complete’ her.

There were moments where I laughed out loud, several of them, I also read a few chapters of this in audiobook form and so I can highly recommend that narration as well as the beautiful hardback. I think there really is something in here for everyone. It is a Christmas book but I think it would work as a funny read to let you escape at any time of year. I loved it and I think you will too!

To order your copy now, just click the link: UK or US