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Third Person  

Fiction

200 Pages

Charlene Dixon—called Charlie by family and friends—is devastated at the recent loss of her job. For the last five years, the twenty-seven-year-old has blossomed as the activities director of an exclusive all-girls school. But when a misunderstanding with the headmistress leads to a pink slip right before the holidays, Charlie packs up her dreams and returns to her grandmother, Sis, who raised Charlie as her own in the mountains of North Carolina.

When Charlie arrives—broken and confused—Sis immediately puts her granddaughter to work behind the scenes of the local school’s Christmas play, A Christmas Carol. Charlie doesn’t always like working with Dustin Kennedy, the drama teacher, but Sis encourages her to take a deeper look at why the book by Charles Dickens had been written in the first place and what it could teach Charlie about the needs of people in their own community.

Why I Choose this Book: 

I thought this book was a modern retelling of A Christmas Carol, and that sounded intriguing to me.

What I Thought About this Book:

First off, this might contain slight spoilers, so read at your own risk.

The concept was really promising. The execution? Well, it didn’t exactly thrill me. It felt like a trite, cliché, redundant story. My favorite part was probably the main character’s relationship with her grandmother who raised her. Sweet parental-type relationships always make me happy. It was also cute that she called her grandmother “Sis” because that was different and I enjoyed it.

I also liked the idea of the plot line that had to do with the main character and her father, an ex-convict. The whole thought of redemption and trying to make right past wrongs is a story line that I find intriguing. The main character’s actions at the beginning of the story were totally relatable and easy to imagine. Eventually though, even that sorta fell flat for me, because I wasn’t convinced. As time went on though, the main character sounded like a over imaginative, high-strung, illogical female, who really needed to stop making a big deal out of nothing. My problem wasn’t with the character though, but more that the story was using weak plot points that didn’t endear me to the book.

The romance also was rather ugh-ish and unexpected, although it wasn’t “wrong” per se. The main character had a crush on a kid in Middle School, didn’t seen him for like ten years, and then fell in love with him within weeks after meeting up with him again. Besides, I didn’t feel like it added much to the story. Thankfully it wasn’t a huge part of the book, so that was nice.

Conclusion:

This just wasn’t my book. It was a “cute” Christmas read, I guess, and I suppose a lot of people would really enjoy it. It did have a few good Biblical concepts like forgiveness, but that didn’t play a huge part in the story.

Rating: