Review: Finding Christmas: A Novel

Finding Christmas: A Novel by Karen Schaler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked up Karen Schaler's "Finding Christmas" based mostly on its gorgeous cover, so I have to admit that my expectations for the story were pretty low. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, for the most part, I enjoyed this book. The story was somewhat predictable and had its share of cheesy moments, but I could easily see it unfolding as a Christmas movie on Netflix or the Hallmark Channel.

As an experienced screenwriter, Ms. Schaler is very good at the visual and other sensory aspects of storytelling. She did a great job of setting the scene, and I often felt as if I were in the story along with the characters, seeing, hearing, and smelling the exact same things they did. That said, while the descriptions were very vivid, I was not impressed with the quality of the writing itself. I found there to be a lot of repetition and awkwardly constructed sentences, among other issues. For example, the main characters, Sam and Emmie, were "impressed" by just about everything they heard or saw, even when some other description would have fit the situation a lot better.

In addition, there were a number of things about the plot that didn't entirely make sense to me:
1. Why would Sam's agent, Candace, drive 6 hours round-trip to read the outline of his new book when he could have just emailed it to her?
2. Why was Emmie so fixated on getting a Christmas tree for her and her boyfriend, Grant, to decorate while they were visiting Christmas Point? Where were they supposed to put it (there was already a tree in their room at the inn), how were they supposed to decorate it (buy an entire tree's worth of brand new ornaments?), and what were they going to do with it when they went home to Seattle? It's not easy to transport a fully decorated Christmas tree!
3. Was Betty the baker really so desperate for help that she had no choice but to enlist two tourists to help her finish decorating her cookies? Yes, Christmas Point was a small town, but surely she had friends or family who could have helped. Also, shouldn't she have offered Sam and Emmie some kind of compensation for giving up their vacation time to help her? She didn't have to pay them, but an offer to refund their class fees seems reasonable.
4. Sam and Emmie consumed almost nothing but sugar for something like two straight days. How did neither of them end up in a diabetic coma or, at the very least, with an upset stomach?

At any rate, the story was overall a cute one, and reading it was a pleasant enough way to spend a few hours on a rainy afternoon. If you are a fan of movies like "The Christmas Prince" (also written by Ms. Schaler), you will enjoy this book.

*ARC provided by the publisher via Edelweiss. All opinions expressed are my own.

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