Jessica Redland

Can love really be found when you stop looking for it...? As Samantha Wishaw watches the love of her life marry another woman, she’s ready to give up hope of finding her happy ever after. But when a chance encounter leads Sam to find friendship in Thomas - a lonely, grumpy elderly widower living at derelict Hedgehog Hollow - her life is about to change forever. Glad to have a distraction from family feuds and match-making, Sam vows to fulfill Thomas and his wife, Gwendoline's, dreams of restoring Hedgehog Hollow to its former glory, and to open a hedgehog rescue centre. Throwing herself into the task at hand, little does Sam realise that the keys to love and happiness may also be found at Hedgehog Hollow, when she least expects it... Escape to Hedgehog Hollow this summer with top 10 bestseller Jessica Redland for the perfect uplifting, feel-good read.

Finding Love at Hedgehog Hollow

Marloes

7.14 on CAWPILE. 

I needed a lot of tissues with this one!

Katharina Hoffmann

Let me start this review by saying that if you’re looking for a cutesy, feel-good romance novel this won’t be the right pick for you.

I was certainly disappointed because I had been looking forward to exactly that: a cutesy, easy-to-swallow romance that would be a very light and easy read. Instead, I got the most annoying audiobook narrator I’ve ever had the misfortune to listen to, insta-love (yikes), the two romantic leads lacking depth and an incredibly toxic mother-daughter relationship which took up a lot of the novel’s space.

Sam is a 29-year-old nurse currently living with her parents after breaking up with her boyfriend more than a year ago. While her dad is incredibly supportive of everything she does, her mum treats her like garbage. We don’t know why, she just does; she never explains herself, which is one of the reasons why this book was such a taxing read. The mother-daughter relationship is toxic (yes, I’m repeating myself but for lack of a better word….) and simply not what I expected or indeed wanted from the book.
That’s not where Sam’s problems end though. Her cousin - who is also her best friend and the sister Sam never had - is getting married to James, Sam’s ex-boyfriend with whom she is still in love. Sam’s heartbroken but a turn of events leads to her meeting Thomas, a grumpy elderly widower who owns a farm that he and his deceased wife meant to run as a hedgehog rescue centre.

The beginning of the book makes it clear that Sam is a total push-over. Girl lets her family and friends treat her like a walking doormat. 😩 It was annoying how Samantha tried over and over to make everyone feel comfortable by never putting her needs first, always compromising her happiness for someone else's. On top of that, she was also annoyingly obsessed with finding true love, finding her ‘one true person’. I think I simply prefer stories in which the MC sort of accidentally falls in love without initially meaning to instead of being obsessed with it. It often comes across as pathetic to me.

Now, regarding Josh, the male love interest: the minute the author compared him to 
  chrisp rat
, it was pretty much over for me. It’s creepy and weird when (female) authors repeatedly reference famous (male) actors (chrisp rat, Adam Driver) in contemporary fiction or when they explicitly state that they’ve modelled their male characters after them. It makes me feel icky plus it’s cheap. Saying this or that character looks like crisp rat/ Adam Driver/… without properly describing the character’s appearance feels like a cop-out. chrisp rat more like cheap prat.

I wasn’t only disappointed with the male love interest but with the whole romantic relationship itself. First of all, some other reviewer tagged this as “friends to lovers”; uhhhh, no, this was another case of haters-to-lovers (first and the second time they meet they naturally can’t stand each other) which quickly transitions to insta-love (is there anything worse?). 



After their first one-night stand, Sam’s already deeply in love with Josh, he’s fallen in love with her and suddenly they’re in a relationship and each other’s most important person.
Given the fact that this is a contemporary romance novel, I expected the romance to take centre-stage but it was never the focus of the story and only really began after the 50% mark. Everything that came before was just Sam and her relationship with her hum, her cousin, befriending Thomas the widower, getting to know about hedgehogs etc. In any other genre, I would have appreciated the love story not being in the foreground but when I’m reading a contemp. romance I’d like the romantic stuff to be up and centre, thank you very much. 

On top of all this, the audiobook narrator was pretty awful. I don’t know why she felt the need to shout the word “chapter” whenever she announced a new one but it was annoying as hell. I was contentedly listening to the story and then BAAAM, the narrator would shout “CHAPTER” into my ears. Furthermore, she managed to let the main character sound super childish whenever Sam spoke which was, uh, tiring. 

I also think that an interesting case for speciesism can be made based on how the characters treat and think of hedgehogs. Sam’s dad is a vet, so is the male love interest, and Sam proclaims to love all animals (at one point she even risks her life for a hedgehog), yet the opening of the hedgehog centre is celebrated with a barbecue?? Anything for the animals as long as they’re cute and not part of traditional western cuisine, right?

If they turn this into a Netflix adaption I just know that I’d eat this up but there wasn’t much I liked about the book itself. 

PS: I listened to the one-night stand scene whilst being on a train surrounded by little children on their way to the zoo. Nothing quite like listening to a sexy times scene while kids are sitting to your left and right.

Finding Love at Hedgehog Hollow

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