Countdown to Christmas by Jo Thomas

Jo Thomas reminds her readers that not everyone spends Christmas in an ideal family unit. Chloe Jones is a single mother whose twelve-year-old son is spending the run-up to Christmas with his father. Reuben knows his Mum will miss him, so he creates an advent calendar to cheer her loneliness. When heir hunters inform Chloe that she has inherited land in Canada, she accepts their offer of a free flight to Quebec.
I enjoyed reading about Chloe’s struggle with the natural world. At Foret d’Esprit, she sleeps in a log cabin and chops her own firewood. Snow lies thick on the ground and her clothes are unsuited to the Canadian winter. The only heat in Chloe’s new environment comes from a disconcerting crush on Theo, the hunky lumberjack type who shows her around. She is about to scurry back to Wales when she realises that pregnant café owner Bea is in desperate need of support. Being a kind-hearted person, she steps in to help.
The business world disturbs the atmosphere of festive romance. The local economy depends on using time-honoured methods to produce maple syrup from lovingly curated trees. Chloe enjoys helping Bea to create recipes for the delicious organic syrup. When she realises that Tremblay Syrups, a large company which makes an inferior product, is threatening to take over the enterprise, she faces a difficult decision. Whether she should succumb to Theo’s manly charms is now the least of her worries.
The story’s diverse French-speaking cast is inter-generational. The action takes place against a background of horse drawn sleighs, ice skating, youth sports, protective moose and a chatty turkey. In A Countdown to Christmas, the genre is given a thoughtful and entertaining twist.
Thank you, Random House UK, Transworld Publishers, Penguin and Random Things Tours, for giving me a free copy of this novel in return for an honest review.
Countdown to Christmas