Christmas / Romance

Home for Christmas

Author: Holly Chamberlin

Average Rating: 1.83 / 5

 

Yorktide, Maine was the perfect place to retreat to and start a new life when Nell King’s husband suddenly left her for his young and very glamorous mistress. No longer a wife, Nell threw herself into being the perfect, always available mother. Six years later, Nell and her two daughters, Molly and Felicity, have built a life in Maine. Now everything is about to change and this is possibly the last Christmas that Nell will have both girls with her. Molly is twenty-one and everyone in town expects her to marry her high school sweetheart soon and take over the family farm with him. However, the closer and more inevitable her future, the more Molly is beginning to question it. Does she want to lose herself in marriage at a young age like her mother did? That didn’t work out so well. Felicity, on the other hand, is caught up in the luxury lifestyle of her Olympian stepmother and wants to spend more time spreading her wings, away from boring Yorktide. Nell is desperate to hold onto her daughters, but the best kind of distraction arrives in the form of her first love, Erik, who is now a wildly successful writer. As the two reconnect, Nell will struggle with feelings of inadequacy and old regrets. But for a Christmas season that is struggling to hold on to the past, perhaps it is actually the future that is brightest of all. 

Lydia : 2.5 / 5

This book was a very quick read and it was just like the Christmas Hallmark movies – if you are a fan of condensed storylines, cheesy/cozy vibes and Christmas then you will likely appreciate this book. 

There were a few problematic things that I noted throughout the novel, one being that Nell is a complete pushover regarding her ex-husband. I would personally not be so cordial to someone who had cheated on me. I was expecting the ex-husband/mistress story line to play a bigger part but it was really just background noise. I also didn’t like how fast the characters’ problems were resolved. Specifically Molly – she was complaining the entire book length about wanting to leave the small town and move and break up with her small town boyfriend but then suddenly everything changes. 

I did like the relationship that developed between Nell and her ex beau-turned-book writer and that was a storyline I wish the author had expanded more on.

Megan: 1/5

I will apologize now for my Grinch review, but I did not like this book at all. I couldn’t find any detail that I enjoyed. Nothing happened in this story. Maybe if I was a mother I could empathize better with the main character, Nell. But I’m not and everything about her came off as a helicopter-mom or a woman sticking her head in the sand to ignore the fact that her daughters were growing up. The story being set at Christmas time only served to make her obsessive compulsiveness more cutesy because it meant she over-decorated and baked way too many sweet treats. Change is hard, but nothing in this book showed healthy ways of dealing with that change. The plot (if you can call it that) was all tied up and presented as a Christmas miracle at the end. 

I found the characters to be quite flat. Since Molly was specifically mentioned on the back of the book, I was hoping that we’d get to read about some of the events through her POV, but we didn’t. That may have improved the story for me. Felicity didn’t seem real. It felt like she was written to be the ideal daughter and there was nothing she could do wrong. The only half decent character was Erik, but even he seemed to be too good to be true. 

If this book was going for charming and cheesy, it missed the mark. It was boring and cringy. I haven’t read any of Chamberlin’s other novels, so maybe this was an off one, but there are better Christmas novels out there. I wouldn’t recommend spending time with this one. 

Sharaya : 2/5

If you’re looking for a Hallmark-movie type of book, then you’ll probably enjoy this read.  It’s cute, fast, and full of Christmas cheer. It definitely has some cheesy moments, but thankfully those are mostly reserved for the end of the story. I will say that the main character and her inner monologue is a bit tiresome at times. The self deprecating mother who isn’t worthy of consideration was a little monotonous after a while. And her over-decorating, baking, and Christmas crafting were over-the-top. 

I typically don’t enjoy shorter novels because it means that the character arc is usually 95% struggle and then BOOM suddenly resolved in a neat little bow. It’s a little too swift and tidy for me. However, there were a few dynamic and fun characters, and Nell’s love interest isn’t what I was expecting, which was very refreshing. I was, however, expecting there to be more development of Felicity and Molly’s storylines and instead they felt a little muddled and cut off from the reader. Plus, Felicity’s arc was in regards to next Christmas, so why was it being dealt with now??

Again, this wasn’t really my thing, but if you want something Christmassy, light and fluffy, that you can read in a single evening, then you might want to pick up Home for Christmas. But there are probably better Christmas books out there.

To access a printable list of 10 book club questions, please click here.