Customer Reviews

Their First Noel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From the back cover:

Four historical romance Christmas stories by your favorite authors!

FATHER CHRISTMAS by Leigh Greenwood
Arizona Territory, 1880. Delivering a young widow's baby during the holiday season transforms the heart of a lonely drifter.

LANTERN IN THE WINDOW by Bobby Hutchinson
Alberta, 1886. After losing his wife and infant son, a bereaved farmer vows not to love again--until a fiery beauty helps him bury the ghosts of Christmases past.

A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE by Connie Mason
New York, 1867. A Yuletide birth brings a wealthy businessman and a penniless immigrant the happiness they have always desired.

THE TREASURE by Theresa Scott
Washington Territory, 1825. A childless Indian couple receives the greatest gift of all: the son they never thought they'd have.

And my review:

I didn't hold out high hopes for this anthology, as I hadn't liked previous works by the first three authors (I'd never read anything by the fourth). So I was pleasantly surprised to find two enjoyable novellas in this historical Christmas collection. All of these stories are linked with a common theme: all are set at Christmas time, and all involve the birth of a child.

Leigh Greenwood's FATHER CHRISTMAS failed to engage me. I didn't feel like I really knew the character of the heroine. She just came across as bland and colorless to me. She was spiritless, and I really didn't know what the hero saw that made him fall in love with her. This felt more like a "throw them together often enough and it must be love" than any real emotions. I didn't hate the characters, I just felt that I didn't really care what happened to them, because I wasn't emotionally invested in them. Two stars.

Bobby Hutchinson's LANTERN IN THE WINDOW was the most enjoyable novella in this collection. For one thing, it was a refreshing change to read a story set on the Canadian frontier, since most stories of this type are set in the US. These were characters that I did feel invested in. I cared about what happened to them. While they originally came together for reasons of convenience, instead of love, the love developed well without being too rushed despite the page restrictions put on the author. Four stars.

Connie Mason's A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE was also a pleasant surprise. I'd tried books by this author before, and always ended up hating at least one of the characters. But that didn't happen here. I loved the heroine (she had such great spirit!) and the hero was more than just your standard tortured hero. He was a truly honorable man, and I was really glad that these two were together. And the children were cute, too, though their characters were not as well rounded as I might have liked, given the page restrictions. My only real complaint with this story was that the author's writing style felt a little rushed, but of course, that could be blamed on the limited number of pages an author gets for inclusion in an anthology. Three stars.

Theresa Scott's THE TREASURE was a story that had a promising premise, but a very choppy and unpolished writing style made it very difficult to read. I kept finding myself lost among pages and pages of dialogue without enough prose to balance it. I'd often find myself having to go back and count the lines of dialogue so that I could figure out who was speaking when. That shouldn't happen. The "easy flow" you want to find in an absorbing read just wasn't there. It was so choppy that I kept getting drawn out of the story. Also, much of the first part of this book was focused on minor characters, rather than on the hero and heroine (who should be the main focus of the romance), which gets tiresome pretty quickly. Two stars.

As with most anthologies, this is a mixed bag, but at least half of it is enjoyable, if not the most memorable. While I wouldn't recommend that you rush out to buy this book, certainly pick it up if you find it at a garage sale or a used book store.

These are some of the best stories written and are set in the Christmas season. I love all four stories...they just touched my heart.