10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice Christmas Themed Romances, December 1, 2006
This review is from: Sugar and Spice (Paperback)
This book is a collection of four romance novellas set during Christmas time.
First up is "The Christmas Stocking" by Fern Michaels. It finds Amy Baran and Gus Moss returning to their hometown to help their parents with projects relating to Christmas trees. Along they way, they meet and the sparks fly. The story started well, but I felt the plot resolved about thirty pages before the story ended.
Second comes "The Ghost of Christmas Past" by Beverly Barton. Katie Hadley is trying to escape her family and her memories, so she rents a cabin in the mountains. A blizzard arrives while she's trying to reach her destination and strands here with Mack MacKinnon. Will the sparks between them melt their cold hearts? This is the only story with any explicit content, but it is all in one chapter, so it can be avoided. Other then that, it was good.
Next is the reason I bought this book. In "The Twelve Desserts of Christmas," Joanne Fluke takes a break from murder and offers a romance with series star Hannah Swensen attempting to help two teachers and six kids left behind at a boarding school during the Christmas break. The kids make a bet over the teachers' romance, and trouble ensues. Joanne has included 9 recipes from her novels and three new recipes. I loved this story with its lighthearted and fun look at romance in a crowded setting.
Finally, "Twelve Days" by Shirley Jump offers office romance as Natalie Harris attempts to tempt boss Jake Lyons for a one night stand. But the secrets might just bring more then either expects. Another fun tale well told. This tale also includes a recipe, bringing the total for the book to a baker's dozen.
Each story is about 100 pages, making for quick reads. I did feel most of them were predictable, but the characters drew me into the stories anyway. Overall, I enjoyed this break from my normal mysteries.
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12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Three writers to avoid in future, but Jump is promising, January 1, 2007
This review is from: Sugar and Spice (Paperback)
I love Christmas-themed romance anthologies, so this was a must-buy as soon as I saw it. Unfortunately, it wasn't worth the money. I get the impression that at least two of the authors just scribbled any old thing, never mind about the quality, just to get their names on the cover and a few more bucks in their royalty account.
Fern Michaels is an author whose name I've seen about on book-covers a lot, but never actually read. Now, I know to avoid her like the plague. If this is any kind of example of her usual work, I don't know how she gets published. She needs to go back to basics and learn about writing style. The novella feels amateurish in the extreme. The characters are flat and uninspiring, the plot is unconvincing and the narration made it extremely difficult to keep reading - in fact, it took me about four separate attempts to finish the novella. Point of view jumps about all over the place, including into the heads of minor characters completely irrelevant to the story - has Michaels ever heard of strict POV? Apart from being much easier for readers to follow than her head-hopping is, it also allows readers to get to know and actually *care* about the hero and heroine. As it is, the characters did nothing for me, and nor did the boring story.
Beverley Barton can do better than this; I know, because I've read other work by her. The Ghost of Christmas Past is horribly clichéd and unbelievably poor. The hero, Katie, still stuck in the early stages of grief for her dead husband after four years (and we're expected to believe at the same time that she's a successful career woman - not likely if she's at that degree of barely-functioning) is too good to be true and extremely irritating. If I were Mack, I'd have thrown her out into the snow to freeze after her second monologue about how wonderful Darrell was/how terrible it is not to celebrate Christmas (and this from the hypocrite who's running away from celebrating Christmas) and the inane TMI about her family, the family she loves so much she's escaping from them. If there was romance in this novella, I missed it. Those two were incompatible in the extreme and what he saw in her I couldn't work out.
As for Joanne Fluke's story, if I'd wanted a fistful of recipes I'd have looked them up on the internet. There were more recipes than story in this novella, and most of the rest was about Hannah, the cook, and all the nonentities in her life, who all presumably appear in Fluke's other novels but were strangers to me and will remain so. Julie and Matt's love story might have been interesting, if we'd ever actually been given it. The story takes up when they've already kissed for the first time. We get a few more kisses, a lot of over-the-top kid-interruptus (including a completely ridiculous, unbelievable misunderstanding - and, by the way, does Fluke know the difference between an email and an IM?), and then suddenly they're proposing to each other. Where was the romance? Sorry, but in between all the recipes I missed out on it. Stick to cooking, Fluke, and don't write romance novels.
Finally, at last a novella worth reading was Shirley Jump's Twelve Days. Office romance, secret Santa and UST, plus a decent dollop of Christmas spirit and fun. I did enjoy this one, and I wish it had been a full-length novel instead of the final novella in this otherwise dismal and boring collection.
This book's now going to the recycle pile, which is a shame in respect of Jump's story, which deserves re-reading - but the rest of it does not deserve space on my bookshelf.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fern Michaels' contributions ruined the book for me, December 14, 2009
This review is from: Sugar and Spice (Paperback)
I just got my Kindle and wanted some light reading so I ordered several Christmas romance collections. Fern Michaels is a name I recognized and so I thought I couldn't go wrong. Well, I guess I could. The woman simply cannot write dialog at all! She has her characters jumping from subject to subject without even taking a breath. Who in real life talks like that?! For crying out loud, she doesn't even start a new paragraph to give her readers some idea that her characters have moved on to a different topic. Several times, I found myself checking to see if I had skipped a page because I couldn't take the leaps of logic that her characters were. The overall affect is that I didn't connect with her characters or her writing and simply found myself irritated with the whole story.
Overall, the whole book was a disappointment and a waste of $5.00. I will never pick up another Fern Michaels book!
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