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Maybe This Christmas is made up of two stories.
“Darling Jenny” is the story of Jennifer Glenn, a young woman whose heart was broken by
her boss/boyfriend. To mend her broken heart, she walks away from her job in Minneapolis
and flies out to Wyoming to visit her widowed sister and her two kids. There she meets
Logan Taylor, her sister’s boss and close friend—a rough and arrogant yet handsome man
who seems to have won Jennifer’s sister’s heart, though Jennifer disapproves (and she’s a
little bit jealous, too). The second story, “Strange Bedfellow,” is about Dina Chandler.
Her husband, Blake, went down in a plane in a South American jungle years ago, and he’s
been declared dead. But just as Dina is getting her life back together (and she’s
announced her engagement to Blake’s best friend, Chet), Blake shows up at her door. It’s
obvious that her refined husband has changed in his years in the jungle, but he demands
that they pick up where they left off.
The book was extremely difficult
for me to read—because I didn’t actually like any of the characters. Jennifer Glenn is
stuck-up and prudish—yet she still manages to fall madly in love with a man who treats
her like a child (but he’s really cute…). And Logan Taylor, while he’s supposed to be a
tough guy with a heart of gold, seems to fluctuate from the extremes—from sometimes nice
and gentle to (most of the time) shifty and violently angry. Call me crazy, but he just
didn’t seem like the ideal man. Their story really doesn’t have any flow—Logan’s
arrogant and rude, and Jennifer hates him…but then she decides that she actually loves
him, even though there’s no real reason for her to change her opinion.
In
“Strange Bedfellow,” Blake is a domineering brute. He walks back into his wife’s life,
making demands and tossing her out of her job of running the family business. And Dina,
though frustrated, repeatedly gives in to Blake just because he’s now rugged and manly
and caveman-like. To be honest, I kept hoping that she’d tell him off and leave him and
continue with her own life. But of course, that’s not what she does. The whole story,
once again, just doesn’t flow. When Blake returns, they immediately act like they hate
each other. And when their relationship changes, it does so for no reason at
all.
I picked up this book, hoping for a quick, easy holiday read—but I
was disappointed with what I got. I found the characters annoying and their stories
random and unrealistic. And Christmas barely played a part in either story—it felt like
it was an aside, just for the sake of making this a Christmas collection. Do yourself a
favor and leave this one on the shelf.
