The Christmas Bookshop is a sweet, holiday offering about a woman finding the place she was always meant to be. It is loosely tied to Jenny Colgan’s Kirrinfief series and fans familiar with those volumes will recognize some of the characters – and plot motifs – from those books in this narrative. You don’t have…
Warning: A Little Christmas Spirit not only tackles life post-Covid, it’s also one of those throwback novels where only The Magic of Christmas And Other People can heal extreme emotional trauma. If you want to dodge either subject, this book definitely isn’t for you. But the book’s off-kilter sense of humor got to me after…
Despite being a family of non-believers, every year we pull out our holiday paraphernalia. We dress the tree, hanging with care the delicate glass ornaments gifted to us over the many years, sentimentally rub our fingers over the ones our children made, pull out the stepladder and put our angel to balance precariously on the…
For my December TBR Challenge, I dug into my stash of holiday anthologies and picked out a Christmas historical anthology from 2009. With one Western romance and one Americana romance, I was hopeful for a little holiday cheer. As it turns out, one story delivered and the other really did not. The first novella, Janet…
Having read and loved Jackie Lau’s A Match Made for Thanksgiving, the first in her Holidays with the Wongs series, there was no doubt I’d be reading the next in the series. With a title like ‘A Second Chance Road Trip for Christmas‘ it promised to be full of trope-y goodness. In fact, all that’s…
This is a curious anthology because while two of the stories are Kelly’s usual fare, one is happy-ending fiction rather than a romance, and the other is a reprint of the novella which introduced Able Six, an eidetic genius very unlike Kelly’s general ordinary-folk protagonists. Boxing the Compass: A (NB: fiction) Captain Paul Fergusson is…
Shannon Stacey’s Cedar Street series continues along with this brisk novella, One Christmas Eve. Now that Zoe Randall’s divorce is over, done and in the can, she’s setting out to enjoy life for herself for once. Back in her home town, she and her cousin Carly have opened a bookstore together, and she seems to…
Romance and the 1991 family film Home Alone are unlikely bedfellows, and Megan Frampton’s The Earl’s Christmas Pearl isn’t even the first romance to give us a historical version of the plot. Her take is an amusing and breezy Christmas novella. Pearl Howlett has accidentally been left behind at her family’s London home by her…
An Invitation to a Cornish Christmas is brought to us by Marguerite Kaye and Bronwyn Scott. The stories take place in Porth Karrek, Cornwall during the 1822 Christmas Season and revolve around the same cast of characters. The Captain’s Christmas Proposal by Marguerite Kaye Grade: B+ Sensuality: Warm Captain…
Seduction on a Snowy Night contains three novellas by some of the best known writers of Historical Romance – Madeline Hunter, Sabrina Jeffries, and Mary Jo Putney. Sadly, only one of the stories is worthy of recommendation. A Christmas Abduction by Madeline Hunter Grade: B Sensuality: Warm This story was my favorite. Caroline Dunham is…