Silly me didn’t realise when I bought this book that it was book 3 in a series, I was just at the supermarket and wanted to get some Christmassy books to get me in the festive spirit. So my review should probably be taken with a pinch of salt as I don’t know any of the back-story to the lives of the women in the book, and I would have probably felt a closer relationship to them if I’d already spent 2 books getting to know them.

As it was, I found the women to be a bit whiny and self-centered and I couldn’t find myself feeling attached to them at all. The main character of the book supposedly is with the love of her life, yet she spends the whole book referring to him as ‘Crush’ instead of his name, or a more appropriate nickname for someone she was hoping to marry. Maybe it’s a reference to the previous book that I completely missed, but it left me feeling like she was a bit vacuous, a feeling replicated across the other leading ladies.

I think I’ve been spoilt by the sci-fi/fantasy books I’ve been reading in that I no longer expect all books to have a perfectly tied up happy ending, so when this book ended with every single woman in the club ending up with her perfect man, I couldn’t help but sigh and think ‘really?!?!’.

Obviously it’s nice to escape into a dream-world for a while and that book is perfect for this. A group of women whose connection is a chocolate shop filled with delicious goodies, and gentlemen round the corner for every lady seems like an ideal place to be.

Unfortunately for me, the Christmassy element of the book which I was so hoping for was a little lacking, as Christmas wasn’t really an integral part of the story, apart from the fact that it gave the characters an ideal place to congregate at the very end of the story on Christmas Day, so the book didn’t really give me the festive boost I was hoping for!

Nevertheless, it was pretty enjoyable and worth a read – probably more so if you’ve already read the first two in the series. I’ve read a few other Carole Matthews books in the past so I knew that she’d be a safe bet for an easy read, and I wasn’t disappointed; I was just looking for a bit more.