Review: The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris

The book is an unapologetic piece of “chick-lit” or, in a much more polite manner of speaking, a romantic comedy.

Mainly set in Paris, it covers the adventures of a small-town English girl who finds herself a job in the chocolate shop after suffering an industrial accident.

It is a tale of Anna Trent growing up to be a woman and discovering that dressing up doesn’t necessarily mean cheap high-street fashion and that less is more. It is all about a quick lesson in French chic for a frumpy 30-year-old who lives on a steady diet of crisps.

All good and light, nothing too exhausting or existential here. But, then along comes a secondary layer of drama that looks at the issue of illegitimacy. One of the key characters has a son who seems to have a longstanding feud with his father for no apparent reason. It does help that the young man in question is a gourmet chocolate maker and looks like a handsome version of Gerard Depardieu.

Anna can’t help but fall for the man and get embroiled in the father-son battle. Nothing too dramatic, nothing too gritty — in the rather picturesque setting of Paris, the relationships do iron themselves out. Of course, someone does die along the way, which is the third layer and the darkest of them all.

It looks at how many stay in relationships well past their sell-by date for all the wrong reasons, breaking more than just their heart in the process. When we fail to follow our instinct and just go with the flow, the beauty of what we receive goes unappreciated because that yearning for the past stays on, like the butter gone rancid. Why do we damage so many lives, all in the name of doing the right thing?

Although part of the book takes the reader back to the 1970s, many of the issues faced by its protagonists continue to plague young couples today, especially in many Eastern cultures — the predicament of love amid presumed social rectitude. Each layer is woven in without a sense of the superfluous and the storyline moves at an even pace.

Jenny Colgan has been in the business for over a decade and is on familiar territory with “The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris”.