Miracle on Regent Street

by Ali Harris

Dreams can come true - it could happen to you...

For the past two years, Evie Taylor has lived an invisible existence in London, a city she hoped would bring sparkle to her life. But all that is about to change. For winter has brought a flurry of snow and unexpected possibilities.

Hidden away in the basement of Hardy's - once London's most elegant department store - Evie manages the stockroom of a shop whose glory days have long since passed.

When Evie overhears that Hardy's is at risk of being sold, she secretly hatches a plan. If she can reverse the store's fortunes by December 26th - three weeks away - and transform it into a magical destination once again, she might just be able to save it. But she's going to need every ounce of talent and determination she has. In fact, she's going to need a miracle.

• ISBN10: 0857202898
• ISBN13: 9780857202895
• Publish Date: 30 September 2011
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 10 November 2015
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Imprint: Simon & Schuster International
• Format: Paperback
• Language: English

Reviews

[Emma (SCR)]

This review was originally posted on Star Crossed Reviews This story is set in a classic British department store, which seems to have lost it sparkle. in it's heyday it was the top store of it's kind. Everyone loved Hardy's.  we begin on the 1st December and each chapter counts down to Christmas stating how many shopping days are left. I loved this. as each chapter passed my Christmas spirit increased. I absolutely LOVE Christmas and Christmas shopping. this store sounded like the kind of Christmas I used to watch in films. Films like Miracle on 34th Street.

I didn't understand Evie at first. She seemed to be stuck in this dead end job and she wasn't happy. None of the staff knew her actual name and just seemed to see her as someone to unload their problems on. I soon realised that Evie was a bit broken. After her ex unexpectedly dumped her she crumbled. she didn't know what to do. By fading into the background she attempted to prevent herself from being hurt again. One day she decided she was fed up of being invisible and wanted to be noticed.

When she hears of the problems with the store and how they have 3 weeks to increase their profits or the store will close she just has to do something. this store means everything to her. When she was a child her parents would take her here every year and these trips meant the world to Evie. She just couldn't face the thought of Hardy's not being around any more. So she set about anonymously remaking parts of the store.

I don't want to ruin the book too much but Evie's little helpers are the best. I loved each and every one of them.

This book was excellent. A fantastic example of Christmas Chicklit at it's best.  It has everything that will make you warm and fuzzy on a cold winter night. This has definitely got me in the mood for Christmas.

[Leah]

Miracle On Regent Street by Ali Harris is a novel that promises a lot of things. It promises that dreams can come true, that miracles may occur and that if I love Cecelia Ahern (which I do) then I will fall head over heels for Ali Harris. And yet, after finishing it I feel let down. I feel, quite honestly, that I was mis-sold by the words on the back of the book. Because whilst Evie does indeed attempt to turn Hardy’s around, there’s no mention on the synopsis that, quite frankly, Evie is one of the worst female characters I’ve read about, that she’s so downtrodden and such a sap… that I had to put the book down after I read the first day. (The book is broken up into chapters/chunks/parts counting down the days until Christmas, with chapters inside of that.)

Mostly I feel as though Miracle On Regent Street would work better as a movie. It’s almost as if Ali Harris wrote it like a movie. I feel that as a Christmassy rom-com starring whomever it would work better, but as a book it’s missing that spark. The book is almost 500 pages long and yet it could have been vastly shorter had someone shushed Evie up; her inner monologue runs to pages and she does seem to have verbal diorrhea. It’s written very poetically too, I mean just in the first chapter we hear of roofs that look as though they’ve had “vanilla ice cream melted over the peppermint, orange, raspberry and lemon-sorbet coloured houses”. I love a good comparison like that, but that’s just a very sickly-sweet way to describe some roofs. Roofs are roofs. Evie just seems to be in her own little dream world and sadly the novel sort of just falls into that, as Evie suddenly becomes some super-hero who is just AWESOME at making a shop suddenly be busy again.

Maybe I’m cynical, or maybe I just prefer my Chick Lit to at least have some semblance of realism, but I just couldn’t shake how utterly stupid it was that Evie was this big savior. Evie managed to be able to shake up the shop so much there was talk of a helper elf? The very same Evie, who allows people to call her Sarah because she’s too much of a wuss to tell them she’s actually not Sarah. Evie, who quite happily then takes someone else’s identity to go on a date with a guy because she feels she “deserves” it, especially after the person whose identity she takes “steals” what should have been Evie’s job. The way Evie’s mind worked was baffling. I couldn’t make out if she was genuinely downtrodden or if she just wanted to come across that way, because she soon perked up once there was a man on the scene, she soon decided that being someone else was perfectly reasonable, and it irritated me.

It had all the right ingredients. It had a plot that could have worked, except the characters failed miserably. Evie just irritated me, the book just seemed to irritate me for some reason. Sometimes you just get off on the wrong foot with a book, and the fact that I had to literally put it down after 88 pages and leave it along for 4 days tells you all you need to know. I had to try to forget how annoying that first day was so I could continue. You expect your characters to grow whilst reading and Evie never does. For a 28-year-old she was rather petulent – throwing tantrums and storming off without letting people finish sentences, jumping to ridiculous and totally wrong conclusions because (gasp) she heard someone on a phone. It felt mishandled, really. Many people will disagree, many people will adore it, but it just didn’t work for me. The only saving grace was the fringe characters like Felix and Lily and Sam, they were the only characters whom I really liked. The rest I could have happily done without, including Evie, and that always ruins a book, when you don’t like the main character, when she’s so insipid you just don’t care what happens to her because, frankly, she deserves to just be a stockroom girl, when she can’t even tell people what her name actually is.