Review: The Northern Lights Lodge

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With a shattered heart and her career completely in tatters, Lucy needs to get away from her life in the UK. But, when she takes a job as hotel manager of the Northern Lights Lodge, she doesn’t quite expect to find herself in a land of bubbling hot springs and snowflake-dusted glaciers – and in the company of gorgeous Scottish barman, Alex.

Determined to turn her life around, Lucy sets about making the lodge the number one romantic destination in Iceland – even though romance is the last thing she wants. However, as Alex and Lucy grow closer under the dancing lights of the aurora, Lucy might just learn how to fall in love again…

Genre: contemporary romance

Publication date: February 2019

Mature content: yes

Review: The Northern Lights Lodge is book 4 in the Romantic Escapes series by Julie Caplin. Unfortunately, a series I thought had started really well ((read my reviews of The Little Cafe in Copenhagen and The Little Brooklyn Bakery), has been steadily declining and The Norther Lights Lodge is the worse so far. 

While the general idea of the story was good, neither the characters nor the plot lived up to it. Both Lucy and Alex come across as unprofessional - and not because they are attracted to each other or romantically involved. Actually, all the staff in the lodge comes across as unprofessional and I have no idea how they actually manage the guests. 

A lot of situations that were supposed to be funny actually sound way too silly to be believable - like when Lucy sheds her clothes to enter the hot pool and help remove a sheep that had fallen in, while there could not only be guests around but also a camera crew trying to document all movements of the staff. Most especially given her recent past and the reason she's in Iceland after all.

There's supposedly a hint of suspense in the story, but - again - once the culprit is discovered the reasons for sabotaging the lodge are too flimsy to even make sense. 

On top of all that, there are editing mistakes here and there, and several glitches in the plot (like saying the sky was clear in one place, and two paragraphs down mentioning the gloomy dark clouds...).

Sadly, I really enjoyed the first installments in the series, and with so many more books published so far, I do want to have a look at the next ones to see if there's improvement. But The Northern Lights Lodge did not work for me at all.

Happy readings otherwise!

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