Christmas is Emmie’s favorite holiday and this year, she can’t wait to show her boyfriend Grant what Christmas means to her. Grant’s been working really hard, trying to make partner at his firm, so Emmie has planned a special Christmas vacation for them and it begins with a scavenger hunt. Too bad the clues Emmie left for Grant end up in the hands of Sam, a writer who has been experiencing a bout of writer’s block. Thinking the scavenger hunt is an assignment from his editor to try to get his creative juices flowing, Sam follows the clues to Christmas Point where Emmie is waiting. When she sees that it’s Sam that has showed up instead of Grant, Emmie is disappointed until she sees that Sam also loves Christmas and they have fun completing all the Christmas events she planned. But will Grant ever arrive at Christmas Town?
You may wonder why I’m reading a book by the same author of Christmas Camp when I thought that Christmas Camp was not that great. The answer is that I checked out several books from the library at the same time and these two books by Karen Schaler were in the bundle. I didn’t realize that they were written by the same author.
What I liked about this book:
I definitely enjoyed the premise of this book and the plot. I loved the idea of a Christmas scavenger hunt and Christmas Point. The bed and breakfast that Sam and Emmie stayed at seemed lovely. All of the Christmas trimmings were on point – there were gingerbread men and snow and Christmas lights and stockings. And of course, I loved Dasher the dog. Who wouldn’t??
What I didn’t like about this book:
This book has a lot of similarities with Christmas Camp. Both books involve a character staying at a bed and breakfast so that they can partake in Christmas themed events. In Christmas Camp, Haley went to the “camp” to discover her Christmas spirit. Here, Emmie wants to take Grant to Christmas Point to show him all the reasons she loves Christmas. Both books have plenty of Christmas activities like cutting down a tree, baking cookies, and having a personalized Christmas stocking. Both books have the same Christmas cookies with the “special” frosting that turns out to be gross cream cheese frosting with candy cane bits in it. Both books even have a dog that lives at the bed and breakfast that seems to have his own personality.
We first meet Emmie when she is walking around the waterfront going into all the shops. She stops at a Christmas shop that apparently she goes into all the time, enough that the shop attendant and owners have a nickname for her – Miss Christmas. Emmie makes a comment that this is the third time she’s been to the shop this week. She then proceeds to buy at least 4 huge Christmas wreaths and other assorted Christmas decorations. Are you aware of how much a real Christmas wreath costs? Those things are expensive! Emmie then buys a second Christmas tree for her apartment. This is all supposed to show how much Emmie loves Christmas but all I could think about was how much money she was spending. I expected Emmie to have this high paying job since she just spent at least $300 on this one shopping trip but we find out that Emmie owns and runs a community center and that all her free money goes there, to the point that she didn’t want to buy a new dress for dinner with her boyfriend because she didn’t want to spend the money. But she spends all this money on decorations? It just didn’t make sense.
The book tried really hard to make Grant out to be a bad guy but I don’t think he is. In my opinion, he wasn’t a bad person, he was just focused on work. Maybe Christmas isn’t as important to him as it is to Emmie. Since this is the first Christmas Emmie and Grant are spending together, we don’t know if he is always a workaholic or if this is just something new in the past few months. Maybe he was really into Christmas last year and this is just an off-year. I just think that Emmie and Grant had different priorities, which doesn’t mean Grant’s a bad person. I’m getting tired of books or television trying to make out workaholics or people who are not big fans of Christmas as grinches.
Once again, as like in Christmas Camp, the writing here is not great. There’s a lot of telling and not much showing. There’s also so much repetition. We are constantly being told that the reason Emmie loves Christmas is that her (deceased) parents loved Christmas and she loved celebrating with them. We get it. You don’t have to tell us that every chapter.
The most cringy part of the book might be when Emmie and her friend are trying to decide what Christmas movie to watch on television. The picks they are trying to choose between? A Christmas Prince, Christmas Camp, and Every Day is Christmas, all movies which are written by the author.
This holiday read had a cute plot but that’s about it. I’ll be sure to check the author names the next time I borrow books from the library to make sure I don’t check out anything else this author has written.
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