This Christmas (2005)

Christmas 2019 - Naughty

I just can't with this one.

The first story, "Vacation" by Jane Green was okay, not great. A married couple with kids fell out of love over time - can a Christmas miracle rekindle their relationship?

The second story, "The Second Wife of Riley" - OMG - I truly don't understand the target audience for this one: rich, spoiled, neurotic Manhattan socialites? Is that a big market?

I enjoyed the book, though honestly it did take a while to get into. But once I got past the first half of the first story it was all very enjoyable. ( )

I enjoyed this book very much. I always like her novels and will read more of her in the future. ( )

I was really excited to get the chance to read a holiday story this year. I am not the hugest fan of holiday fiction but every once in a while I get in the mood. Maybe it’s because I needed an extra jolt of holiday spirit or something so when this was sent to me for review I squealed with glee. Awesome, just what I needed. However, upon opening it, it wasn’t quite what I had hoped for. Why? Well the stories totally stressed me out!

I’ll break it down for you, this here is a collection of three short stories. One each by the above named authors. It appears as though they were all originally published back in 2005 so I think they may have slapped a new cover on this and called it a new book so don’t be alarmed if you’ve read these stories before. I however, have not so I wasn’t too disappointed to have been given it although I was surprised by the copyright date.

The first story was probably the best of the bunch. Jane Green’s is entitled “Vacation” and it is about a wife, Sarah Evans, who has become disillusioned with her life. Not the newest story out there but one I could get behind. She loves her children but she misses the satisfaction she used to get from her job and her life in her city and she is not happy with how her and her husband had grown apart. His job sends him to Chicago and this gives them a much needed “vacation” from each other to decide if they should make their marriage work, just in time for the holidays. What was good about this short story was you could empathize with Sarah and her plight and if you are a Jane Green fan (which I am) you’d want to read this one.

The second story was by Jennifer Coburn, a new to me author, and was entitled “The Second Wife of Reilly”. From what I can gather Coburn has written a novel called “The Wife of Reilly”. I haven’t read it and I probably won’t because the second wife was vapid and obsessed with the first wife. It was the holidays, she was 6 months into her new marriage to a great guy and was so obsessed with his first wife that the book couldn’t talk about anything else. I found myself saying ‘just go to therapy already’ or ‘why did you marry him then?’

The final short story was by another new to me author, Liz Ireland. “Mistletoe and Holly” was set up to be this story that I could get really excited about. A couple that had just started dating, Holly and Jason are about to spend their first holiday together at Holly’s parents house. Holly has talked it up as normally being over the top, yet when they arrive it all becomes a bit of a disaster. Normally, this would be something I could relate to and crack up over. Except when it’s the middle of the holidays and you, yourself are dealing with families and running from one thing to the next you want to escape reality (not that this was actually happening, I’m just saying) not be totally stressed out by a story in which everything that could possibly go wrong did. It was totally making me paranoid!

So, here we have a collection of Christmas stories in which all three were a bit depressing and one was good. I think there are probably better collections out there. However, at the holidays we are all probably so highly strung we are all looking for something different in our reading! ( )

I received this book as a review copy. I wanted it because Jane Green wrote one of the stories. The book is a quick read and perfect for the busy Christmas season. I wanted to read but didn't have a lot of time to sit down and really get involved in a novel. I enjoyed it and am thankful I won the copy.