Book Review: Christmas Bliss

Author: Mary Kay Andrews
Publication Date: October 22, 2013
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

From the New York Times bestselling author of Summer Rental comes a novella that celebrates love, the holidays, and antiques.

Christmas is coming, but Savannah antique dealer Weezie Foley is doubly distracted both by her upcoming wedding to her longtime love, chef Daniel Stipanek and also by the fact that her best friend and maid-of-honor BeBe Loudermilk is due to give birth any day and is still adamantly refusing to marry her live-in-love Harry.

Listeners have come to love these characters in Mary Kay Andrews’s three previous Savannah novels: Savannah Blues, Savannah Breeze, and Blue Christmas. Christmas Bliss offers Andrews’s legions of fans the best of many things: familiar characters, a new novella for Christmas, and a celebration of Mary Kay Andrews’s own favorite pastime-antiquing. Blue Christmas was a fan favorite, and now Christmas Bliss is sure to fly off store shelves and into the hands of Andrews’s fans in bestselling numbers.

Even Jethro knew better than to try that fruitcake.

I was humming “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” under my breath as I trotted toward the truck.

I didn’t want me to mess this up either. It had taken me years, but I’d finally managed to find Mr. Right. And I didn’t intend to let anything or anybody spoil my hard-won happiness.

She laughed and wrapped her pinkie around mine. “Pinkie swear.”

Bring on the Christmas cheer, especially if it is in the form of a book written by Mary Kay Andrews! This is my second read by her this year, and I was very pleased with both of them. This book actually features characters from two of her previous books: Savannah Blues and Savannah Breeze. Told from the perspectives of Bebe and Weezie, this book centers around the Christmas season and the happenings in the lives of both of these women. One of these women is only a week away from marrying the love of her life, on Christmas day, while the other is pregnant and refuses to marry the father of the child, for reasons only the her best friend knows. Knowing their situations, you should be halfway to your car and on your way to purchase this book!

Being an avid fan of Mary Kay Andrews, I can honestly recommend this book to anyone who loves thought-provoking characters, timeless mishaps, and a lot of love and laughter. This book is not your typical wedding day disaster book, but is just predictable enough to be comforting and cozy. Andrews always throws a twist in somewhere and leads readers down paths that they were not aware of. This book is full of characters that I already know and love, having read her other books, but without reading them, I am sure that anyone could invest in Bebe and Weezie’s stories.

This time of the year would be the perfect time to read this book, so this is definitely a plus. I love to read books that put me in the Christmas spirit, and this book did just that. This is the first Christmas themed book I have read by Andrews, and now I am wondering if she has anymore?!

***A copy of this book was provided to me by the publishers at St. Martin’s Press in exchange for my honest review***