One Charmed Christmas

May 1, 2020

After numerous No. 1 New York Times best-selling doggie delights, Cameron returns with A Dog's Perfect Christmas, featuring a peppy puppy easing a family's tough holiday problems (300,000-copy first printing). In Colgan's Christmas at the Island Hotel, set on an island between Scotland and Norway, new hoteliers Flora MacKenzie and brother Fintan get ready to open for the holidays while island-girl Isla loves her posh new waitress job and kitchen assistant Konstantin, secretly a duke's son sent to learn about hard work, starts liking the environs (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). The standard bearer for Christmas fiction, Evans keeps on glittering with The Noel Letters (200,000-copy first printing). In Macomber's Jingle All the Way, work-obsessed Everly Lancaster escapes the holidays for a tour of the Amazon river basin with handsome guide naturalist Asher Adams but suddenly feels she should go home for a snow-flecked Chicago Christmas. In Mallery's Happily This Christmas, single mom Wynn Beauchene helps cute neighbor cop Garrick ready his home for his visiting daughter, and the rest is romance. Novak's A California Christmas offers a new "Silver Springs" story to match the shine of the holidays (400,000-copy mass market and 10,000 hardcover first printing). In Roberts's One Charmed Christmas, emotionally burdened Catherine Pine escapes the holidays by taking a European river cruise, where not one but two suitors--a doctor and a chocolatier--await (75,000-copy first printing). Finally, In Donna VanLiere's The Christmas Table, John Creighton builds a table for his wife in 1972 and a pregnant Lauren Mabrey finds its decades later at a garage sale, with fabulous recipes stuffed in a drawer (150,000-copy first printing).

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2020
Four pairs of West Coasters?Catherine Pine and her best friend, Denise Sophie Miles, and her sister, Sierra Trevor March, and his brother, Kurt, and Dr. Rudy Nichols and his daughter, Athena?find their lives intersecting in ways they never expected when they all wind up on the same Rhine River holiday cruise. Family, friendship, love, and loss all play their part in the perfectly executed plot of this stellar standalone from Roberts, whose gift for distinctively bringing to life each character in her diverse cast is truly commendable. The tasty icing on Roberts' wunderbar literary Lebkuchen are the picture-postcard-perfect glimpses of the Netherlands and Germany.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)