Review: Felicity At The Cross Hotel by Helena Fairfax

A quaint hotel in a romantic location. The Lake District is the perfect getaway. Or is it?
Felicity Everdene needs a break from the family business. Driving through the Lake District to the Cross Hotel, past the shining lake and the mountains, everything seems perfect. But Felicity soon discovers all is not well at the Cross Hotel …
Patrick Cross left the village of Emmside years ago never intending to return, but his father has left him the family’s hotel in his will, and now he's forced to come back. With a missing barmaid, a grumpy chef, and the hotel losing money, the arrival of Felicity Everdene from the notorious Everdene family only adds to Patrick’s troubles.
With so much to overcome, can Felicity and Patrick bring happiness to the Cross Hotel … and find happiness for themselves?
Ikira's Review: 4 of 5 stars

This story is everything you'd want from a holiday read - it's fun, lighthearted, comic and romantic, all rolled into one. There's nothing too heavy but it still has depth.

Fliss is immediately a likeable character. She's clearly kind and understanding, has a generous nature and seems so very down-to-earth. She see's the good and bad in people but chooses to make her own judgements rather than take the word of anyone else. 

Patrick is initially not so likeable but he soon begins to grow on you once you get to know him. He's a great male lead and as it turns out, the perfect match for Fliss, just as she is the perfact match for him. They compliment each other so well and this is one of those stories where the reader (and everyone else) knows it before they know it themselves. 

This pair are thrust together in unexpected and uncertain circumstances. Neither would have imagined meeting the other; let alone falling for one another. This type of love story has been written a million times, in various different ways but it certainly hasn't gotten old yet! Maybe because it's so true to life and yet still the fairytale 'romance' we all wish for.

My only reservation about the writing of the story is that the author appears to have used a thesaurus a little too much at times with unnecesarrily superfluous (see what I did there?!) words. It's very occassional and if you have an exceptional vocabulary, you may not even notice. I consider myself reasonably intelligent and have a vast vocabulary but whilst I could follow the gist of the story and 'guess' the meaning of these words, I was left confused as to why the simpler, more widely understood vocabulary couldn't be used.

Overall, a very good read.
 
*Book provided to reviewer ahead of release in return for an honest review.