Christmas Roses - Amanda Cabot

This story is on the short side, coming in under 200 pages.

Mark is searching for his father.  For the past two years, he's followed leads all over the country until he ends up in the town of Easton.  When he tries to find a place to stay, he finds a mother holding onto a sick baby that needs his help.

Celia runs a boardinghouse and needs boarders or she may not be able to keep doing what she loves.  Her husband is dead, and she has a baby to take care of.  The people in town tell her that she needs to remarry to provide her daughter with a father, but Celia won't settle for anything but love.

This is a sweet tale where you know what's going to happen ahead of time, so there's not really any surprises.  I wish more authors would be a bit more creative and stop using a sermon as the epiphany moment for characters, it just seems to be overused.

This is a well written story that I did enjoy.  It's the kind of lighthearted thing I like to read around Christmas and this didn't disappoint.  I liked the little details of Swedish traditions that the author incorporated and may just try the pound cake recipe at the end of the book.  Good Story!

For Such a Time - Kate Breslin

For Such a Time is meant to be a retelling of the story of Esther.  Hadassah, a Jew, is taken in by Aric, the leader of a concentration camp during WWII and given a job as his secretary.  She uses her skills and influence to do what she can for her people and tries to fight her attraction to Aric.  He's the enemy after all.

As time goes by, Hadassah's secrets become harder to hide.  She finds herself torn between how she feels about Aric and how she feels about her people.  She becomes attached to a small boy and has to stay out of the way of the cruel captain.

Granted, this was not the best choice for me to read around Christmas.  My timing only amplified the negative aspects of the story, and there are a lot of them.  I mean, we are talking about a concentration camp.  Nothing good happened at those.  Even at the end of the story, the war isn't over.  I guess I'm supposed to come up with my own ending of what happens after the war, but it was just too depressing and I wanted it to be over.

The book is well written, it's just the subject matter was a turn off for me.  I need glimpses of hope throughout a book to feel the satisfaction of a happy ending.  With this story, I didn't see how it would work, and the ending didn't help.  In the end, I just wasn't overly fond of it.

The Innkeeper of Ivy Hill (Tales From Ivy Hill #1) - Julie Klassen

This appears to be the first in a new series, Ivy Hill Tales.

Jane’s husband died over a year ago and left her in control of their inn.  The place has been falling to pieces, but Jane isn’t happy to see her mother-in-law step over the threshold.  They’ve never really gotten along but saving the inn is going to rely on these two working together.  With a bank loan due and Jane’s childhood home becoming the competition, Jane has her work cut out for her.

I hate to say it, but I didn’t like this book.  It has the feel of a Lark Rise to Candleford, where we read about what goes on in someone’s life, even the uninteresting parts.  We read a lot about Jane’s attempts to learn how to improve the inn, but her interactions with people didn’t lead me to understand why they liked her so much.  I didn’t even understand the relationship between Jane and Thora.  What happened in there that they changed their minds about each other?  I never understood it.  And there’s a miscarriage scene in there that was pretty depressing.  Just be aware of that if it’s something that bothers you.

There were also some things that just didn’t make sense.  If there’s such a shortage of men, how do we have 5 different men showing interest in these two different women?  And I didn’t see anything in either of their personalities to warrant that kind of attention.  Thora is harsh and judgmental, and Jane is apathetic.  The story line with Rachel felt crammed in, and I didn’t understand why it was there.  She didn’t have the kind of connection with the Jane/Thora story that would have made the transitions to her point of view believable.  Granted, she was one of my favorite characters and almost wish she’d been the main character.

I’ll take partial responsibility for not liking this book, because I wasn’t necessarily expecting this kind of story.  But after disliking Lady Maybe, this was me giving the author another chance.  I found her characters flat and the story line uninteresting, and expecting something different doesn’t account for that.  At the end, there was a mention of a second book in the series, but I’m out.  I used to enjoy this author so much.  Unfortunately, with this book, I kept hoping Jane would fail so it would be over.  I’m saddened to say it, and maybe others can appreciate this book, but I just could NOT get into it.  No matter how hard I tried.

*I received a copy of this book from Bethany House through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

For the Record (Ozark Mountain Romance #3) - Regina Jennings

This is the third book in the Ozark Mountain Romance series.  The first two are A Most Inconvenient Marriage and At Love's Bidding.  This book also has ties to the story Her Dearly Unintended, which appears in the novella collection With This Ring?  Josiah from that story is the brother of Betsy, the heroine in this book.  

Pine Gap has a new deputy in the form of Joel.  He’s come from Texas and hopes he's left scandal behind.  He’s determined to leave all women alone for the sake of his reputation, which he's learned is easily lost.  What he didn’t count on was meeting a woman like Betsy.

Betsy does what she wants.  At twenty-four, she’s on the shelf and doesn’t mind.  What she sees in Joel is an opportunity.  She starts writing fantastical stories about the deputy’s heroics and sending them to faraway newspapers, maybe with an embellishment here and there.  But it’s fiction, so it won’t hurt anyone, right?

Joel finds proving himself in the mountain community to be difficult.  For a while now, there’s been a group of vigilantes taking care of things, and they’re not convinced turning the law over to Joel is the best idea.  When there are rumors a murderer is back in the area and criminal activity increases, Joel is going to have to find a way to discover the truth before something really bad happens.

I really enjoyed this book.  I loved Betsy’s character, and her spunk had me grinning once in a while.  Joel was also not quite what you’d expect from a dashing hero, but in a good way.  Katie Ellen and Josiah (from the novella) are in there, but you won’t be lost at all if you haven’t had a chance to read their story.  There's mention of the characters from the other books, but you won't be lost reading them out of order.  All in all, I have no issues giving this a Good Book! review.

*I received a copy of this book from Bethany House through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Conspiracy of Silence (Tox Files #1) - Ronie Kendig

There’s a prequel that goes with this series called The Warrior’s Seal.  This is the first full-length novel.  The second one is called Crown of Souls and is due out sometime in 2017.

Tox “Cole” has been in hiding for three years.  If you want to know what led up to that isolation, make sure to read The Warrior’s Seal.  A threat has brought him out of hiding and back into the life of his brother, the president.  Now Tox is under orders to take a team and eliminate a threat.  He insists on his team, who believes he’s dead.  When they find out he’s not, Tox has to earn their trust all over again.

Kasey “Haven” has admired Cole from afar for as long as she can remember.  But he’s only ever seen her as the little sister of Brooke, Cole’s one time girlfriend, and his brother’s late wife.  Kasey never believed in Cole’s guilt and is committed to proving his innocence.  Cole's pardon is in her hands, but the deal is that she doesn’t reveal who she really is.

Cole senses immediately that there’s something familiar about this woman, but it takes him a while to figure it out.  In the meantime, Tzivia is still around, and Kasey has an admirer of her own trailing after her.  Tzivia was on a dig where she believes she’s found evidence of a major Biblical event.  There are dangerous people after these artifacts, and it seems there’s another deadly disease associated with the artifacts.

I really liked this one.  I was a bit wary of the addition of the supernatural threats, but they aren’t inserted in a weird way.  With the AFO still on the loose at the end of this one, it looks like you need to read them all and in order to understand the whole picture.  Normally, I don’t read series like this, but this author has a great style and I gladly break my rule for her books.  The end was a real page-turner, and I was getting nervous when I saw I was close to the end and didn’t know how things would ever get figured out that fast.  I was happy at the end and look forward to Crown of Souls.  Good Book!

*I received a copy of this book from Bethany House through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.