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Sugar and Spice
written by Fern Michaels, Beverly Barton, Joanne Fluke, Shirley Jump
Studio : Zebra
by Zebra
Publisher : Zebra
Released : 2006-11-01
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780821780473
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 10 reviews)
List Price : $7.99
Our Price : $2.35
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Product Description |
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The Christmas Stocking, FERN MICHAELS. Philadelphia businesswoman Amy Baran is determined to raise money for a new seniors' center by harvesting Christmas trees from the small-town Virginia farm she remembers from her childhood. Trouble is, Gus Moss has come home from California with his own ideas about saving the farm his father has neglected. Neither wants to give up, but when attraction turns to romance, they just might have to give in . The Ghost of Christmas Past, BEVERLY BARTON. Wounded Special Ops officer Mack MacKinnon doesn't have any reason to look forward to the holidays -- until he rescues pretty widow Katie Hadley from a raging blizzard. Now, in a season of miracles, he's falling as hard and fast as the Christmas Eve snow . The Twelve Desserts of Christmas, JOANNE FLUKE. Take two lovestruck teachers. Add a dollop of conspiring kids. Place in a boarding school over Christmas break. And add a little help -- and eight, great recipes -- from amateur sleuth Hannah Swenson, and you've got a romantic holiday tale that's sweet, delicious, and definitely served warm. Twelve Days, SHIRLEY JUMP, Of all the luck -- Natalie Harris can't believe she drew Jake Lyons as her Secret Santa pal! The dreamy hunk leaves her completely tongue-tied. But with twelve days of secret gifts, sweet notes, and steamy emails to go, she just may conquer her fear and discover something surprising under the tree. |
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Great Holiday Book! |
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Great book to put you in the mood for the upcoming holiday season. My favorite story is by Fern Michaels and she is the reason I bought the book in the first place. I love how she writes! I read an excerpt from "The Christmas Stocking", in one of her 'Sisterhood' books which are my very favorite along with her Texas, Vegas, and Kentucky series'. |
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Sugar and Spice |
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Very good book. Could not stop reading until book was done. All of Fern Michaels book are very good. |
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christmas in a book |
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Ordered this book for the short story by Joanne Fluke and was happily surprised that the others were good to. The second story was a little trashy but overall a good book. |
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Full of Christmas Spirit and Fun |
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This Christmas-themed anthology comes from four well-known authors and offers some light reading for the romance lover. |
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Three writers to avoid in future, but Jump is promising |
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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