A Little Christmas Spirit: A Novel
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Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
Single mom Lexie Bell hopes to make this first Christmas in their new home special for her six-year-old son, Brock. Festive lights and homemade fudge, check. Friendly neighbors? Uh, no. The reclusive widower next door is more grinchy than nice. But maybe he just needs a reminder of what matters most. At least sharing some holiday cheer with him will distract her from her own lack of romance…
Stanley Mann lost his Christmas spirit when he lost his wife and he sees no point in looking for it. Until she shows up in his dreams and informs him it's time to ditch his scroogey attitude. Stanley digs in his heels, but she's determined to haunt him until he wakes up and rediscovers the joys of the season. He can start by being a little more neighborly to the single mom next door. In spite of his protests, he's soon making snowmen and decorating Christmas trees. How will it all end?
Merrily, of course. A certain Christmas ghost is going to make sure of that!
Reviews with the most likes.
A Christmas Carol / The Grinch / Up Mashup. If you go into this book expecting a romance - how it was marketed to me - ... ummmm.... yeah, this isn't really that. The “romance” here is fully tacked on in the last 20% of the book, with the guy barely mentioned at all before that point (and even in the “romance” here, the rest of the plot of the book is still truly the driver). But if you go into this as more of a women's fiction / Christmas type book, it works quite a bit better. The focus is largely on Stanley, who is an amalgamation of the memorable parts of Scrooge (from A Christmas Carol, including a Christmas Ghost in the form of his dead wife), The Grinch (and his too-small-due-to-pain heart), and Carl from Pixar's Up (grump old widower who doesn't really like kids... at first). Then we're introduced to Lexie and her son Brock, and from that point on Stanley's life will never be the same again. But the majority of the book really is spent on Stanley, Lexie, and Brock, with the edge to Stanley and his memories of his wife (and interactions with her ghost). Here, it really does work to be a heartwarming tale (or heartworming, for those adverse to stories that get a bit saccharine at times, and in nod to the word I originally wrote there :D) again in line with A Christmas Carol and The Grinch. A fun tale that could have gotten a lot more depressing than it ever did, this is a solid Christmas tale... just not a Christmas Romance. Very much recommended.