Book Review - Kate and Clara's Curious Cornish Craft Shop by Ali McNamara

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Title: Kate and Clara's Curious Cornish Craft Shop

Author: Ali McNamara

Format reviewed: Ebook

Source: Netgalley

Publisher: Sphere

Publication Date: 23rd July 2020

Rating: 5 Stars

Welcome to the glorious little Cornish town of St Felix - where romance and magic sparkle in the summer air

Kate thinks all her wishes have come true when she opens her own little craft shop in the idyllic harbour town of St Felix.

But she soon finds a mystery lingers in her new shop - a sixty-year-old love story told through beautiful paintings and intricate embroideries.

Jack, the owner of the nearby art shop, volunteers to help Kate unravel the mystery, but in doing so they realise their own lives share some uncanny similarities with Clara and Arty, their 1950s counterparts . . .

Can Kate and Jack put right a decades-old wrong, and maybe find their own happy ending on the way?

Whenever you are in St. Felix in an Ali McNamara novel, you know to expect the unexplainable! There is something about this Cornish town that provides a dash of the unusual and a sprinkling of what can only be described as magic. 

So I was greatly impressed and intrigued as to what would be present in this story, and well I'm not going to say, but it is such an original idea,  a really clever mechanism and really did add another dimension to this story. 

As a massive fan of this author I was delighted to see a return to a familiar location and the previous heroines Poppy and Ana, are present in this book, not in a big way, but just enough to know what is going on with them.  As a result this is easily a standalone book and if I hadn't just mentioned the setting and characters, then you probably wouldn't even realise while reading it! 

There are two main stories being told, Kate, Jack and Julian's in the present day, and also Clara,  Arty and Maggie's in the late 1950s. I loved seeing the parallels between the two and discovering just how they interconnected was a joy. 

It is also a very nice change to have a hero and romantic lead in a wheelchair, you just don't see that anywhere near enough in the sorts of books I tend to read, and I loved Jack and his attitude to his disabilty so much.  And it was eye opening as to how various people treated Jack. 

I loved Kate's shop, her two colleagues who only have her best interests at heart and keep teasing her whenever she is meeting a man, even just as friends, and her teenage daughter who was one of those rare not overly stroppy sorts of teenager! 

This was such a pleasure to read, from a truly magical author.  I adored being back in St. Felix and Ali McNamara is one of only a few authors that can make me believe in the impossible and think it is all perfectly feasible! 

Thank you to Sphere and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.