Merry Christmas, everyone! What a month it has been, my friends. I had another hectic month of work and life, but it’s Christmastime so I can’t complain. This month I’m reviewing a book that was selected by one of my Instagram followers—The Christmas Wish by Lindsey Kelk. And to accompany today’s review I made a whiskey sour or, for the pun, a wishkey sour.
Whiskey Sour Recipe
2oz Whiskey
1oz Brandy*
1oz Lemon Juice
0.5oz Egg Whites
1oz Apple Juice*
1oz Simple Syrup
2 dashes Bitters
1 Cinnamon Stick*
1 Lemon Wheel
*These are optional ingredients.
In a shaker with no ice, combine liquors, juices, and egg whites. Shake for approximately ten seconds then pour into a rocks glass filled with ice. Add bitters and garnish before enjoying!
Whiskey sours are one of my favourite classic cocktails. So in my opinion, there’s really no way to not enjoy this one! I did, however, add a few different special ingredients this week. This month’s novel centres around making a Christmas wish on a sixpence found in traditional figgy pudding. So, I chose the least gross ingredients of figgy pudding to add to this month’s cocktail—brandy, apple, and cinnamon. And they were all great additions! The brandy mixes nicely with the whiskey, the cinnamon stick adds the Christmas, and the apple makes it taste like an apple whiskey sour. Honestly, it was the perfect cocktail and additions for the novel and for Christmas.
The Christmas Wish Synopsis
(from book cover)
Newly single lawyer Gwen Baker is hoping that a family Christmas—countryside, a mountain of food and festive films—will salve the sting of her career hanging by a thread and her heart being trampled on. Because everyone else has their life sorted: even Dev, her boy-next-door crush, is now a tall, dark and handsome stranger with a fiancée. She can’t help wishing her future was clearer.
Then Gwen wakes up to discover it’s Christmas day all over again. Like Groundhog Day but with eggnog. And family arguments. On repeat.
As she figures out how to escape her own particular Christmas hell, Dev is the one bright spot. He might be all grown-up but underneath he’s just as kind and funny as she remembers.
Maybe, just maybe, her heart can be mended after all.
But how do you fall in love with someone who can’t remember you from one day to the next?
Review
“Tomorrow is nothing more than yesterday’s today.”
As I said above, I’ve had a busy month and this is coming out on Christmas day, so this is gonna be another short one. Overall, I liked this novel. The story was cute, the characters were fun, and it was just as Hallmark-y as you can want at Christmas. Unfortunately, however, I didn’t love The Christmas Wish. It’s sitting firmly at the just OK mark. So let’s get into it.
The writing was, again, just OK in this novel. I thought the story was cute and sweet, but it didn’t feel very original to me. I know, I know, it’s a Hallmark-y Christmas romance, so what did I expect for originality? But don’t get me wrong, I actually haven’t seen that many Hallmark Christmas movies like this one. The unoriginality comes from the time loop thing, which I feel was really overdone this year. I typically like the time loop concept, but I’ve been noticing too many books using it this year and I’m kind of over it.
Another one of my complaints with the writing is that there was a lot of telling and not showing. It wasn’t horrible, but it seemed like I was being force fed the foreshadowing at times. My biggest problem with the writing, however, was actually with the editing. There were numerous proofreading and continuity errors. These mistakes, unfortunately, brought me out of the story and detracted from the quality quite significantly. For example, it was pretty disappointing to read that someone entered the room at 7:30 then have another character say it’s not even 7 just one page later. These types of errors completely interrupted my reading and brought down my rating of The Christmas Wish drastically.
One other note about the writing that is largely a subjective complaint, is that there were a couple of diabetes jokes that I found to be in poor taste. My best friend suffers from diabetes, and it was disheartening to see such ignorance about a serious condition during my reading. Again, this is largely a subjective complaint, but if you think joking about any type of illness is funny you’re not cool.
Moving on to a positive note about the writing, I really enjoyed the dialogue. It all felt natural, believable, and frequently made me smile. I especially enjoyed the dialogue between Gwen and Dev. There were, however, a few times that the dialogue seemed a bit stilted, but I think that largely connected to the Britishness of the story and the character’s personalities.
Speaking of the characters, I liked a lot of them. They were realistic and all stuck out to me. I felt like I could’ve pictured them from their personalities, even if there had been no descriptions in the story itself. I also found Gwen super relatable, especially coming from a family where I’m the younger sister to a seemingly perfect older sister, even though she’d be mad at me for calling her that (sorry Raye-Raye). Speaking of family, I really enjoyed how the story looked into Gwen’s relationship with each of her family members. Her connections to all the people in her life made me look at the relationships in my life as well (Cerys especially had me appreciating my own sisters A LOT), which I thought was nice for a Christmas read.
The characters were also not perfect, however, and I found myself getting annoyed with Gwen a few times. This irritated me in a if-you-just-made-less-dumb-decisions-none-of-this-would’ve-ever-happened way, but didn’t overly affect the quality of my reading. Again, characters are allowed to have flaws just like real humans are, I just wish people would stop writing characters that cause all their own problems by making silly decisions.
But all in all, the story was nice. It had a good message, didn’t feel forced, was just the right amount of cheesy, made perfectly British Doctor Who jokes (my favourite TV show of all time), and made me smile and tear up on multiple occasions. The errors did bring me out of it a lot, but the story held itself up enough to not let them completely ruin it for me. So for all those reasons, The Christmas Wish is sitting solidly right in the middle for me. I would recommend it to some people, but maybe not to anyone not interested in Hallmark romcoms. But, if you’re looking for a light, feel-good, holiday read then this one’s for you. And I definitely recommend my Christmas cocktail for accompanying any reading or activity you get up to this holiday season.
My Rating:
Thanks for reading! And, if you read the book or try the cocktail let me know in a comment or on Instagram. Also, if you haven’t yet read my previous reviews, I recommend reading The Invisible Husband of Long Frick Island, The After Midnight Library, and Fallen Anxious People if you liked this one!
Teghann
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