So let us begin with a Happy New Year of Reading to all as I wrap up my last book challenge of 2024, the Yuletide Spirit Readathon hosted by Michelle Miller at Seasons of Reading.
I was planning to read one new book and reread two from my personal library but as it turned out, I read two new titles and partly reread one(just didn’t have time to finish before year’s end). Hey, there’s always next time and the pair that I did complete gave me a fine good feeling for the season indeed:
Christmas with the Queen
Co-written by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb, this charming historical fiction spans several years from the first official holiday address given by Queen Elizabeth I in 1952 to her first televised address in 1957.
Connected by this annual event are Jack and Olive, old friends who parted no long after the end of WWII; he is now a widower working as one of chefs at Sandringham, where the Royal Family stays during the holidays, she is an ambitious BBC reporter and single mother who gets a golden opportunity to cover the Queen’s Christmas celebrations.
Over the years, Jack and Olive rekindle their friendship and perhaps more yet there is a certain secret that could put a stop to any romantic future before it even starts. Can these yearly meetings lead to a lasting relationship or has that moment gone for good?
Gaynor and Webb tell a lovely story that has you rooting for these characters despite the odds as well as paints a vivid portrait of post-war England for readers to fully enjoy. It’s also great that Queen Elizabeth occasionally enters the narrative without overwhelming the main plot and leaves her gently human touch upon the proceedings:
The other new book was one of my Book of the Month Club selections(yes, I swapped out one Christmas themed mystery for another) and it helped that Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year had a Christmas in England setting like I originally wanted this TBR to have.
Cozy mystery writer Maggie Chase is not having a great year so when she gets a surprise invitation to attend a Christmas house party in England with renowned author Eleanor Ashby, aka the Duchess of Death, it’s a sign of better things to come.
However, that pleasure is somewhat dimmed by the presence of Ethan Wyatt, popular spy thriller writer who vexes Maggie both personally and professionally-for one thing, his latest book was chosen over hers for a celebrity book club endorsement and for another, he keeps getting her name wrong!
When the two of them reach Eleanor’s estate and meet the other guests, including another writer and Eleanor’s contentious relatives, things start to become clearly not what they seem.
In fact, the hostess herself goes missing and several other potential fatalities occur that force Maggie and Ethan to reluctantly team up to see if this mystery is a staged event or leading to a truly last Christmas for one and all.
I have to say that this was quite the lively holiday adventure, well wrapped in romantic tension and engaging moments of suspense. Carter certainly has a way with pairing up a smartly bickering couple with fun flair there; it was sort of like Agatha Christie meets Castle and hopefully,we get a sequel in our stocking next year:
My thanks to Michelle Miller for setting up these reading romps and I look forward to the upcoming Winter’s Respite readathon (still working on the TBR for that one!).
In the meanwhile, I am ready for new reads and new pop culture delights, in particular the return of many great TV shows such as Abbott Elementary(doing an amazing crossover with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia!) to warm up the chilly nights ahead of us.
Hopefully, we all can find things like that in common to keep us going through out the rest of this unpredictable year:
