Some books are like cotton candy: sweet, fluffy, and dissolving to nothingness soon after you’ve tasted them. And, like cotton candy, once in a great while, especially during the summer, I crave their sugary goodness. I just finished reading The Tea House on Mulberry Street, a charming, all-ends-happily tale centered around an Irish tea shop in Belfast and the various and sundry characters who frequent it. Besides the tea shop proprietors, an estranged husband and wife, there’s the aspiring artist, writing love letters to Nicholas Cage, the plump housewife plotting revenge on her cheating husband, the aging bookseller besotted with the florist across the street, and the twin spinster sisters, who discover that life can still hold surprises – and those are just the first few I can think of.

It was a light, easy read, and reminded me of the Maeve Binchy novels I used to read as a teenager. But too much of this kind of treacly writing, and like cotton candy, I’d soon have a stomach ache.