ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Christmas with the Queen by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb

Christmas with the Queen is published by Harper Collins and is out now in paperback, eBook and audiobook. I purchased my own copy.

December 1952

As a young Queen Elizabeth II prepares to deliver her first Christmas speech, staff work behind the scenes to get ready for the festivities at Sandringham Estate. Among them are Jack and Olive – old friends who are surprised to be reunited after seven years apart.

While Olive works for the BBC reporting on the royal family, and Jack is employed in the queen’s kitchens, their bond deepens – until a secret threatens to tear them apart. When the truth comes to light, it could change Olive and Jack’s lives forever.

But maybe Christmas has one last gift to deliver…

How lovely it has been for this royalist to read a Christmas book set around the royals and specifically our late Queen Elizabeth II. The story is told from three points of view: the Queen, Olive and Jack. It’s 1952 and the Queen has only just ascended to the throne after the death of her father. Jack is a chef who gets the chance to work in the royal kitchens and finds himself tasked to work at Sandringham over Christmas. Olive works for the BBC trying to make a name for herself as a royal reporter, and when she is sent to Sandringham to report on the Queen’s first Christmas she runs into Jack, a man she knew at the very end of World War II.

I really enjoyed how the stories of Olive and Jack were entwined with Christmases at Sandringham and the annual Queen’s speech. Although the Queen’s sections are short, they set up each year’s events perfectly, before we return to Olive and Jack, their home lives, their work and their hopes for the future. There’s a deliciously frustrating will they/won’t they storyline running through the whole book and some added complexities from both sides that make their reunion run far from smoothly.

Christmas with the Queen is a delightful, heart-warming, festive story that anyone who loves royal or historical fiction will enjoy. Behind the scenes at Sandringham makes for a wonderful setting, as does London in the 1950s with austerity still biting. I found it to be a charming mixture of fact and fiction, and an enthralling story with interesting, well-formed characters.

Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning, New York Times, USA Today, and Irish Times, bestselling author of historical fiction, including her debut THE GIRL WHO CAME HOME, for which she received the 2015 RNA Historical Novel of the Year award. THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER’S DAUGHTER was shortlisted for the 2019 HWA Gold Crown award. She is published in thirteen languages and nineteen countries. Originally from Yorkshire, Hazel lives in Ireland with her family.

Heather Webb is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of eleven historical novels, including Queens of London, Strangers in the Night, The Next Ship Home, and Christmas with the Queen. In 2015, Rodin’s Lover was a Goodread’s Top Pick, and in 2018, Last Christmas in Paris won the Women’s Fiction Writers Association STAR Award. In 2019, Meet Me in Monaco was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Goldsboro RNA award in the UK, as well as the Digital Book World’s Fiction prize. To date, Heather’s books have been translated to seventeen languages. Check her website for more details on release dates and book club visits.