Review: Sunshine at the Comfort Food Café

Sunshine at the Comfort Food Café by Debbie Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My name is Willow Longville. I live in a village called Budbury on the stunning Dorset coast with my mum Lynnie, who sometimes forgets who I am. I’m a waitress at the Comfort Food Café, which is really so much more than a café … it’s my home.

Willow is the youngest of four children born to Lynnie, a yoga-teaching new age hippie. Unfortunately Lynnie is now suffering from dementia and Willow spends her time looking after her mother whilst juggling her own cleaning business and working as a waitress at the cafe. Relentlessly cheerful with her pink hair, Doc Marten boots, pierced nose and tattoos, she and her mother have journals in which they try to write every day - Lynnie to help her remember who she is and who other people are, Willow as a form of therapy.

As the book opens Willow is writing her journal entry for the day, a list of eight things that happened to her during the day, some mundane, some weird and some inexplicable. Her cleaning service has been engaged on behalf of the new owner of The House on the Hill (the locals' name for Briarwood, a large old house which has sat empty for 10 years after the previous owners retired. There she meets the young owner, Tom Mulligan, a former resident when Briarwood was a children's home, now a successful, but socially inept, inventor and millionaire. Soon Willow and Tom are bonding over their plans for surviving the Zombie Apocalypse and their nerdy dog names (Bella Swan and Rick Grimes in case you are interested).

This is a feel good geeky romance set in a wonderful village where everyone meddles in each others' business and social life revolves around the cafe and the pub. However, a warning, this is relentlessly British and there may therefore be a number of cultural references which fly right over the heads of other readers (or I might be making assumptions about the narrowness of our culture). If you like schoolboy puns and stories where no-one is too busy to sit down and eat a slice of cake (its mentioned 34 times according to my Kindle) then this is the charming book for you.

I loved it from start to finish, I want to know more about Willow's sister Auburn (because of her hair colour) and brothers Van (big ears as a baby) and Angel (blonde curls as a baby), although Angel prefers to be called Andrew now and is a teacher.

This is the second book in this series that I have read, they can easily be read as stand-alone novels as the various relationships between the villagers are explained (Willow even does a handy-dandy Game of Thrones style recap for Tom's benefit), I really must get hold of the first two books and read them!

Highly recommended for fans of Strictly Come Dancing, cake and dogs!

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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