Looking for something a little more lighthearted after my foray into a post-apocalyptic flooded world, I eagerly picked up a special on Kindle, written by Jenny Colgan and billed as a short story. The Christmas Book Hunt seemed to me more like a novella, being 127 pages long (most short stories don’t exceed 30 pages), but I never mind if something is a longer read than it “should” be, especially if I’m a fan of the author, so I was happy to jump in. Besides, it’s about books…

It’s a story about Mirren, a London-dweller whose beloved, elderly Aunt Violet is fading away. Mirren is anxious to make her last days happy ones, and Violet has expressed a desire to see a book she remembers from childhood—an extremely rare one-off of a well-known children’s classic hand-illustrated by a famous artist—but Violet has no idea what happened to the book after her father was gone and her life took a turn for the impoverished. It’s likely the book was sold, along with most of their other possessions, but it was such a rare and beautiful thing that hopefully it’s still out there somewhere.

Mirren eagerly jumps online to search for it, but can’t find more than a whisper that it even exists; she then decides to venture into the real world of rare books to see if she can track it down by Christmas. But canny dealers are alerted by Mirren’s search and, as she makes her way to bookstores from London to Hay-on-Wye and then to Edinburgh, her progress is being followed by several people who desperately want the book for themselves…

Although the story is billed as a “meet-cute” romance, the parts that deal with this are much less satisfying than is the relationship depicted between Mirren and her aunt, the real love story here. Because of the way the romantic interest (the nephew of a greedy rare book dealer) is introduced, then dropped, only to pop up again at the end, the happily-ever-after possibility that seems to present itself felt unlikely, as well as somewhat insincere. But I really enjoyed the hunt for the book and the unexpected turn of events for Violet. I’m hoping (after the close of the story) that Mirren shows some good sense and treats Theo with the lack of trust that should have been engendered from the beginning if not for her naïveté.