Short story: A Very Coco Christmas by Robert Bryndza

Length: 83 pages

Please note that the cover image leads to a Universal Amazon buy link for the book

What they say: It’s 1985, and eighteen-year-old Coco Pinchard is home in London for Christmas after her first term at Aberystwyth University.

She has started to write, and fallen hopelessly in love with Daniel Pinchard, a devilishly handsome musician from the wrong side of the river. But Coco’s overbearing mother has other plans and resumes her campaign for Coco to meet and marry the ‘right sort of man’, preferably Kenneth, son of her best friends Adrian and Yvonne Rosebury, who will be joining them for Christmas.

As snow falls softly over the city, and Coco tries to juggle a series of hilarious events, the stage is set for a Christmas lunch like no other.

A Very Coco Christmas is a delicious, stand-alone prequel short story to Robert Bryndza’s smash-hit Coco Pinchard series, with a glorious cast of characters including Daniel’s mother Ethel, sister Meryl – and a turkey called Jean Paul Belmondo…

The Review: I’ll begin by directing you to the other reviews I have for Mr Bryndza on this blog-where we first meet Coco in the brilliant ‘The Not So Secret Emails of Coco Pitchard’ here or his excellent thrillers, ‘The Girl In The Ice’ here, or ‘The Night Stalker’ here.

So, yes, at the end of the first Coco book, I had declared I was running to his other books and then, as per usual, I got sidetracked, sidelined and all in between until I saw that this book was free until the New Year and I jumped, because the lovely, hilarious Coco, and Christmas sounds like festive perfection to me, and it was!

This is a prequel, and possibly those of you new to the Coco series should read this first, but for anyone who has read the other books, this is a delicious eye opener, where we go back to a time where things were simpler, and Coco was just beginning to get to know herself as an adult (and Coco, having previously always been Karen) as she returned home from college in Aberystwyth in Wales. I again was astounded that someone who does characters so well, and has comedy that is so funny, with such crazy drama, can also write such beautiful, vivid settings, that make you want to go visit the place.

Coco is also really getting to know Daniel Pitchard (yeeks!), in every which way (wink!). They’re in love and she doesn’t care who knows it. Only her parents don’t. Her parents, and in particular her mum, are excellent and live on a different planet (metaphorically, this is not going to turn weird, don’t worry!), to Coco, finding appearances and perceptions to be very important in their extremely planned, just-so lives. I nodded through this short story, delighted at the humour, at the bonkersness of everything, and smiling away at where I knew it would end up-Christmas chick lit perfection.

Rating: 5/5 and free for the moment so go get!!!