Here are some more Christmas-sy books I’ve read recently.
A Tale of Two Christmases
Rosemary Whittaker
221 pages
2.5/5
Summary: Annie never comes home for Christmas. There’s too much chance of running into Alex. He broke her heart, and she never wants to speak to him again.
Alex always comes home for Christmas. He’s desperate to talk to Annie about what went wrong between them.
Faced with a family crisis, Annie reluctantly agrees to spend the holidays with her parents. It shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid Alex for just one week.
But she didn’t expect to arrive in the middle of the wedding of the year. The entire village will be there, and no one will be able to avoid anyone else.
It’s a battle of two Christmases, and only one can win.
Oh look, another book which involves a bitchy friend who tries to come between the main character and her lover. How boring.
A Tale of Two Christmases tells Annie and Alex’s story over the course of two Christmases two years apart. However, I did find this to be a problem because I really think that the time apart should have been longer. Two years just wasn’t enough time to really feel the distance between the two characters. They were basically the same people and hadn’t grown or changed enough as people.
Annie doesn’t trust Alex. At all. At every point during the books she’s suspecting him of having a girlfriend or cheating on her with very little evidence except form the aforementioned bitch friend. When she texts him for an explanation, his response is reasonable but she takes that as confirmation that he cheated without any further clarification. This also annoyed me.
I don’t actually hold out much hope for these two lovebirds. Annie obviously doesn’t trust Alex no matter how much she likes him and if only two years have passed between the first and second Christmas, she hasn’t had enough time to grow as a person and to stop being a jealous cow.
Let It Snow
Beth Moran
350 pages
2.5/5
Summary: After the end of a long-term relationship, local weather girl Bea Armstrong has been avoiding her family, and their inevitable ‘I-told-you-sos.’ But with Christmas fast approaching, she is finally on her way home to Charis House, the school in Sherwood Forest that her mum and dad run in their old family home. And to top it all off, the insufferable Henry Fairfax – who her parents have always wanted her to marry – has also been invited.
Relief comes in the shape of a last-minute interview for her dream job. There are just a few minor problems… The interview is in Scotland, Bea has no car, and the snow is falling already. The only solution is for Henry to drive her – could this Christmas get any worse…
But during an unforgettable two-day interview, a stay in a log cabin and a nightmare journey through the snow, Henry turns out to be nothing like she thought. And when Bea’s first love and recent ex shows up, Bea has a difficult choice to make…
I mainly just found Let it Snow to be rather boring despite how much actually happened in the book.
There are several plot threads all revolving around Bea and her potential love, Henry. The first is that she is up for a new job and has to travel to Scotland for the interview and Henry is the only one who can take her. Second is the family Christmas that Henry has been invited to because his parents are friends with Bea’s parents and the third one is about the potential closure of her parents’ school. There’s just too much going on so nothing really gets the attention it deserves. The book is only 350 pages long.
Bea was boring and a little too perfect for my liking. She doesn’t seem to have any flaws apart from devoting most of her romantic life to a loser. Henry is rather two dimensional and only has ‘hot nerd’ as a way of describing him. They were enemies at school because he was a nerd but now they’ve all grown up and he’s a hot nerd, Bea suddenly finds herself attracted to him. I wonder why.
I found Bea’s family to be intensely irritating for the majority of the novel. They all come across as very self-centred, caring more for their perfect Christmas than Bea’s feelings. I wouldn’t want to visit my family for Christmas either if my family were like that.
THE HOBBLEIT 