Book Review: Christmas on Nutcracker Court

"There's enough love in that single penny to see you through anything life throws your way."


I'm a completist.  This is a word that was coined by one of my coworkers specifically designed for me. One of the things that this entails is that I have to finish a book once I start it.  I'm also a 0-8.  When I was a national conference for hemophilia camps (I'm a camp director of a hemophilia camp for those who didn't know), a keynote speaker taught us numerical way of categorizing people, and it was learned that I was a 0-8.  This made the other people who I knew at the conference laugh, because all of his jokes about 0-8s were the epitome of me.  Part of being a 0-8 is that I can only read one book at a time.  0-8s are obsessed with order and linearity.  And it's true.  I can't start a book, until the last one before it is done.  Luckily these aspects gave me motivation to finish this book, because just when I started reading this book, my turn on the hold list for the very last Percy Jackson book came around.  If this didn't happen, it could have been very hard to finish this book as quickly as I did. 


In Fairbrook, there are several people struggling with their different struggles and learning that service to one another will solve every problem they ever had, because an angel told them so.

This book is just bad.  It's fluffy, Christmas slop in the worst sense of the word.  It's badly-written and mushy, with the most cliche cliches in the history of cliches.  If you made a list of the top 10 cliches in Christmas mush stories, it would hit every single one of the cliches.  Also, one of the characters is a novelist with writer's block, and I wondered if the endless descriptions of him trying to unblock his writer's block were simply descriptions of the writer trying to unblock her own writer's block.  Furthermore, one of the characters gives him almost endless writing advice, none of which the writer of the book followed herself, except for that which was bad advice. 

The book is Christian literature, so maybe that's why it has been published regardless of its complete inability to be readable.  However, may I refer you to BlimeyCow's analysis of using Christian as a modifier for entertainment. 

Not to mention, the book actually used the phrases, "But her biological clock was ticking," and "she felt another hot-flash coming on."  I couldn't make these things up, people.

Best thing I can think of for the entire book:  It's got a pretty cover.  

So, it's a one-star rating for Christmas on Nutcracker Court

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