Jill Steeples, Winter at the Dog and Duck

My first book by this author (and my first post for a long time). 

Ellie has returned to the village where she grew up having been made redundant. She moves into her parents' house (they are away for several months), starts a dog-walking business and gets a job at the pub that's been a sort of home-from-home to her in the past. But the pub, despite being the centre is village life, is threatened as the lease is up and the brewery has sold it. Inevitably, Ellie's meeting with local landowner Max goes badly from the outset - she's covered in mud, he's mocking. So you know that the course of the book will be their series of misunderstandings and miscommunications - it's a familiar pattern, but not the easiest to handle. Some authors do it wonderfully (think Lizzie Bennett and Mr Darcy, mother and father to the whole trope). Here, it's no more than okay - Max charges headlong into things without asking, Ellie is wilfully obstructive a lot of the time. You want to shake them both. Neither really has a satisfactory excuse for their behaviour, but I suppose that's actually fairly typical of people in general. 

Overall, it's a feel-good novel that serves its purpose of being comfortable and unchallenging, despite the visit to the refugee camp that's a pressing issue and deserving of more serious handling. But I still enjoyed it, and may look for further further instalments (it seems to be first of a series of four). 

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Boldwood Books, for a review copy, for which I have invented (possibly not originally) a new category which I call Nest-Building. This will be applied when the main characters repair old houses, refurbish pubs, learn new domestic skills etc. I seem, in company with many, many others to be drawn to such books, and indeed, always have been. I had a picture book when I was small in which a girl called Caroline repaired an old house helped by a motley crew of animals including a lion-cub in a safari suit. It was very sweet, and seems to have stuck with me.