Review: Christmas at Hollybush Farm

Christmas at Hollybush Farm by Jo Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jemima Jones works for a chain of hotels, planning events and holiday celebrations alongside her boyfriend Matthew who manages one of the hotels. The two of them have been given the opportunity to open and run the latest hotel in Seattle, so they have popped home to see Jemima's father on his farm to celebrate an early Christmas before the season kicks in properly. But when they arrive Jemima's father has had some sort of episode and the farm is in dire straits. Jemima has no choice but to pull on her (pink) wellies and muck in, she might have left the farm behind but she loves it too much to let it go.

But it's not just Hollybush Farm, the entire community is struggling, local shops have closed, people are on zero hours contracts, or unemployed. Jemima's father has been supplying potatoes from the farm cash-in-hand to the local café, which does a black-market trade in jacket potatoes rather than the microwave burgers and fries the new owner has put on the menu.

Frustrated that her family could have to give up the farm, or at least sell the land to developers for solar panels, and horrified that she was guilty of perpetuating the cheap food at any cost ethos, Jemima vents her frustration with a reel on social media. Soon she has accumulated a following, they call her the Social Shepherdess, and when the landlord closes the local café because he has sold it to a chain only a few weeks before Christmas the community comes together in protest.

This was sweet, heart-warming, and a perfect cosy Christmas small-town story. Very Jo Thomas. I must admit cynical me did wonder how someone could afford to run a generator but not be able to pay for a jacket potato for lunch, and wonder who was buying the ingredients for all the fillings, but that's a minor point.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

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