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“This is a prequella to the Coco Pinchard series, and I absolutely loved it! It was unputdownable!” Laura’s Little Book Blog
It’s 1985, and eighteen-year-old Coco is home in London for Christmas after her first term at Aberystwyth University. She has started to write, and fallen hopelessly in love with Daniel Pinchard, a devilishly handsome musician from the wrong side of the river.
But Coco’s overbearing mother has other plans and resumes her campaign for Coco to meet and marry the ‘right sort of man’, preferably Kenneth, son of her best friends Adrian and Yvonne Rosebury, who will be joining them for Christmas.
As snow falls softly over the city, and Coco tries to juggle a series of hilarious events, the stage is set for a Christmas lunch like no other. A Very Coco Christmas is a delicious, stand-alone ‘prequella’ to the smash-hit Coco Pinchard series, with a glorious cast of characters including Daniel’s mother Ethel, sister Meryl – and a turkey called Jean Paul Belmondo…
"...a light, fluffy, romance with a touch of Christmas chaos, which will appeal to people looking for a light, amusing, read."
Reviewer: Reader for Bookangel.
It is Christmas 1985, and the middle-class Coco is coming back from university. Christmas is a stressful time anyway, and with a working class boyfriend, a match-making mother, a stray pet turkey and the first introduction of two very different families, this one is going to be a doozy.
After all the angsty, grim, Christmas novels now coming out, it is nice to find something that views the season's family perils with a shrug and a chuckle. The main heroine is hardly flawless and occasionally annoying but then she's a nineteen-year-old, very sheltered, teenager so this rings very true. It is competently written, and amusing although I never found it laugh-out-loud funny. Written in 2013, the author has done his research into the 80's - mentions of Bananarama and The Two Ronnies set the date nicely as do the reference to Merry Christmas Everyone, that year's Christmas no 1.
Robert Bryndza uses traditional British Grammar with single quotes for speech, which is unusual in an ebook and very nice to see. There are a few grammar errors, full-stops before quotes, but I am really nitpicking to mention these. However, the internal formatting does let this down. Paragraphs and speech are not inset, creating the appearance of a "wall of text" which made the story a little difficult to get into. It also contains a bonus chapter for one of the author's other books at the end, covering Christmas 2008 and another domestic disaster.
Overall, this book is a light, fluffy, romance with a touch of Christmas chaos, which will appeal to people looking for a light, amusing, read. Rating:3
This was a fun little read for the holiday season. I sort of wish it had been a bit longer, but it was very funny and full of drama nonetheless. It very accurately illustrated how awkward and crazy Christmastime can be, but in a very light and humorous way.
I'm certainly looking forward to reading the rest of the Coco Pinchard series!
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