Once Upon a Dickens Christmas #2
by Michelle Griep
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An engaging Christmas tale by Michelle Griep !
This is the second short novel in a series of three and I read the first one last year, it was also very good ! Each story is readable as a standalone.
____ THE PLOT___ London, 1853: Mina Scott, is the daughter of an innkeeper and dreams of living a life with more adventures like in the books she loves to read so much and dreams of becoming the wife of William Barlow, a regular guest at the inn, with whom she has become infatuated.
William is the son of a gentleman, but due to a dissolute past full of fun and zero responsibilities, he now finds himself working as an employee and longs to become his uncle's heir, also to be able to have the means to care for his very ill mother.
To achieve this goal he needs a wife immediately and must be able to unmask his wicked cousin's evil plans.
___MY OPINION ___ This is a second chance sweet tale.
The story is sweetly romantic in a clean way, so I don't recommend it to those looking purely for a Christmas love story, with passionate kisses or something more extreme, you won't find it here (nor obviously did I expect to find it).
On the Goodread page you will see that it is tagged as Christian fiction, but unlike other Christian fiction that, by chance, I happened to read, fortunately here there you'll not find mental prayers to God every 3 pages. The meaning of Christianity is given by the moral of the story:
forgiveness, the ability to give others another chance and the ability to appreciate what we have, without envy and without considering "the neighbor's grass always greener than ours".
Values that should apply to every good person of any religion (and therefore there is no need to read Christian fiction to be a good believer in God or a good person... sometimes I am shocked by the bigotry I read in some reviews of Christian fiction).
The second chance is given to many characters in the story :
1) to Mina who will be able to understand how much value family ties have and how lucky she is in her simple life.
2) to William who has already had a second chance in the past, but now he will have a second chance to find true love and show mercy towards those who they are hostile to him.
3) to William's uncle who opens his heart to his nephew WARNING SPOILER ___ he will also find the happiness of female company and a marriage to live his old age with love. SPOILER END
4) to Mina's elderly friend, who in her youth had lost her true love WARNING SPOILER ___ and will finally be able get married and be happy. ___ SPOILER END
5) WARNING SPOILER ___ second chance also to the wicked characters ___ SPOILER END .
__ANOTHER THING APPRECIATED __ The quotes from Dickens' novels at the beginning of each chapter and the interesting historical notes at the end of the novel.
I was already aware of many of the notions reported, but I nevertheless appreciated them and a couple of them were totally new to me (read the story to discover them).
___ THE FLAW __ The book involved me from beginning to end, but in reality I only rate it 4 stars instead of a full 5, because while at the beginning of the story, the reader can find a nice humor that makes the read cheerful and pleasant, from about 40 % of the story this humor disappears.
A quality that I love about this author (and in authors in general) is precisely the sense of humor, the ironic and funny jokes, which are fundamental to me both in whodunits and in romances.
Here not only after a while the story has lost this precious element (precious to me ), but the author wanted even to reinsert it at the exactly wrong moment:
WARNING SPOILER ___ after I waited for the declaration of love and the consequent kiss, throughout the book, I read a scene, which should be very romantic, with 3 people, where the third person makes jokes that should make the reader laugh .
William declares himself under the incitement of the third person and even kisses Mina at the sarcastic suggestion of the third person. A very quick and flat kiss that gave me no emotion or thrill.
---> As I already said, I wasn't expecting hot scenes, but I've read many clean romances where with a simple kiss, the writer gave me butterflies in my stomach! ___ SPOILER END
In this the author miserably failed and made me angry. So only 4 stars.
FINAL NOTE : I'm from Italy, so you will probably have found some form/grammar errors in my text, but I hope I have still managed to convey my thoughts to you in the right way.
:-) Christmas has just passed, so I count on your forgiveness and I wish you a Happy New Year!
12 Days at Bleakly Manor by Michelle Griep
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