I haven’t read anything for a month! Actually, I did spend about three weeks reading At Home by Bill Bryson, which was enjoyable nonfiction, but I have been lax about my other reading. I will have to make up for it during my upcoming time off work.
I picked up this one because one of my book groups chose it for a book chat. I don’t think I would have picked it up otherwise since it wasn’t book length, and yet the publisher was charging hardcover prices. What a “nice” holiday gift – tra-la-la-la-la and let’s take your money. But if I had enjoyed it more (like the similar Balogh book last year), I probably would have considered it worth the price. Unfortunately…
Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor by Lisa Kleypas
(2010, Contemporary)
Grade: 3
Mark Nolan is convinced he doesn’t want a family, until his sister’s death leaves him with custody of his niece Holly. He and his brother Sam both love Holly, but what she needs is a mother. Mark has a girlfriend, but there’s something about toy store owner Maggie Collins that he just can’t get out of his mind…
This book contained the outline of a good story, but unfortunately the short length didn’t allow it to be fully developed. The story was a bit sentimental for my taste, with more focus on Holly than on the hero and heroine. But there were some good points. The setting of the San Juan islands was picturesque and interesting (even though the detailed descriptions sometimes made the book feel more like a travel guide than a romance). And there were some nice touches – I loved Maggie’s toy shop, and her dog Renfrew. Lisa Kleypas’s writing was excellent as usual. However, the characters themselves only seemed sketched out. We found out the main points of their lives – Maggie’s a widow from a big, loving family, Mark was scarred by his parents’ bad marriage but loves his brothers – but there just wasn’t enough time for their characters to be filled in. The author just tried to put a book’s worth of story in a novella’s worth of pages, and it didn’t quite work.
Sometimes I feel like a Grinch because I roll my eyes and gag at cute kids in romance novels. Give me a hot guy in my romance novels and I promise to be nice to Cindy Lou if I run across her down in Whoville. 
Karen Wheless
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