Celebration at Christmas Cove by Carrie Jansen Published by Penguin on October 26, 2021
Genres: Fiction / Romance / Contemporary, Fiction / Romance / Holiday, Fiction / Romance / Romantic Comedy
Pages: 304
Format: ARC, eBook
Buy on Amazon
This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.
In this humorous and heartwarming romance, sparks fly between a woman who can't wait to leave a wintry New England island, and a widower who would do anything to stay.
Travel magazine writer Celeste Bell is in a terrible mood. Not only was her flight to the Caribbean diverted to a Massachusetts island, now it looks like she'll have to spend Christmas there. Single and still mourning the loss of her mother a year earlier, Celeste is desperate to avoid any emotional entanglements and all holiday festivities. She just doesn't feel like celebrating.
But that's exactly what community center director Nathan White and his young daughter Abigail want to do. Nathan is entirely focused on making sure that his daughter has a happy Christmas, especially with the knowledge that if he can't raise money for the community center soon, it will close and they'll have to leave the island. When he meets Celeste, Nathan begins to feel a connection and wonders if he's brave enough to risk his heart once more.Thawing their frozen hearts, and saving the community center will require a Christmas miracle. But tis' the season...
Celebration at Christmas Cove wasn’t the joyous holiday story I was expecting which was disappointing. ~ Sharon – Simply Love Book Reviews
The premise of this book is a travel writer ends up being rerouted through an island town in Massachusetts on her way to do a story in the Caribbean right before Christmas. While frantically trying to get off the island to get to her job mainly because of her boss who needed an attitude adjustment, she falls in love with the town, its people, and even with Christmas again.
This book was far too slow, there were wonderful parts that I adored but grew weary of Celeste’s need to rebook her travel when it was clear she wasn’t going anywhere during a storm, her hate of Christmas when it had always been a special time for her and her late mother, and her general attitude especially at the beginning of the book. The problem was Nathan wasn’t much better, facing the community center he was the director of closing down due to lack of funding and being down to the wire looking for funding elsewhere instead of asking for help he took it all on himself thus becoming a grumpy jerk on several occasions in this book. I believe it was the stress because he seemed like a genuinely nice man, but the fact he didn’t even realize he was hurting his daughter’s feelings when all he talked about was making sure she was happy following his wife’s death three years prior, it just seemed out of place. Both the main characters stressing out about work obligations for the majority of the book just put a huge damper on it, and while there was some fun there wasn’t enough to make me love this book.
This book read exactly like a made for TV holiday movie including the fact that they barely kissed in the book but had all these feelings when honestly they didn’t spend enough time together to really know each other.
What shined were the people of the town the way they were woven throughout this story and the mysterious (or not so for me as I figured that part out early on) Arthur. I loved the description of the town, it felt magical unfortunately the story didn’t live up to that magic.
Celebration at Christmas Cove wasn’t the joyous holiday story I was expecting which was disappointing.