Poppy Jenkins

Poppy Jenkins is a joyful story of love, intrigue, passion and mysterious meanderings through a tiny mid-Wales village where we all live, no matter where we live. Clare Ashton has charmed her way into readers’ hearts with three previous award-winning stunners (Pennance, After Mrs. Hamilton, and That Certain Something), but she’s damn near going to cause a fan-girl and fan-boy riot after they read Poppy Jenkins. Casual on the face of it, Poppy Jenkins, is a multi-layered odyssey of such subtle, sophisticated telling that one doesn’t know if the pages are flying by because one wants to know what happens next or if one is having an existential crisis of life-altering magnitude. Turns out it’s both! The book opens as Poppy, the main character, experiences the re-awakened jolt of wildly thrashing mixed feelings when she sees, for the first time in years, Rosalyn Thorn. Rosalyn, Poppy’s once best friend, rejected Poppy years earlier in the kind of memorable disconnect that makes “ghosting” look cordial and polite. Thorne didn’t so much ‘get away’ as ‘go as far away as possible.’ And now, this many years later, Ms. Thorn, in her black Jaguar, has come back to the village to visit her parents. And drive Poppy crazy. At first blush, Poppy Jenkins, the young woman, is a pastoral dream come true. But Poppy, it turns out, in classic Clare Ashton subterfuge, has a shadow side easily perpetuated by her convenient lapse in memory bolstered by a willingness to shelve her own heartache…

As soon as I got to the end of Poppy Jenkins, I turned to page one and started reading it all over again. It was even better the second time because I noticed all of the subtle reactions and side actions that I had missed the first go around when I focused on Poppy's POV. The story is about two best friends who grow up in a small town in Wales but who for unknown reasons at the time part ways in an ugly manner. They connect years later, each having chosen a different path after university, one living the big city life and the other moving back home to be with family. It's a warm hearted, very funny and charming story, chock full of great secondary characters and the leads of course are delicious. The descriptions of the small town and the lush natural setting are so gorgeous and intimate, I just know the author had to have grown up there. I would highly recommend if you love witty writing, great characters, steamy romance and the small town story telling similar to Fried Green Tomatoes and the movie, Mystic Pizza. I will definitely read more books from Clare Ashton.