Monday, December 27, 2010

Small Town Christmas

Small Town Christmas was one of Debbie Macomber's 2008 Christmas books and contains two novellas - Return to Promise and Mail-Order Bride - reissued from previous titles.

Return to Promise begins in Promise, Texas with Cal Patterson, a rancher, and his wife Jane, a doctor. When a family emergency calls Jane to California, Nicole, a manipulative character from Cal's past puts her sites on Cal. In Mail-Order Bride, Caroline is tricked into an arranged marriage and ends up in Gold River, Alaska with her new husband, Paul.

Both stories were light, easy reads and fairly predictable with feel-good endings. However, I'm not sure why they were packaged as Christmas stories since neither had a Christmas theme such as her Mrs. Miracle books that have become classic Hallmark Channel movies.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Green

Ted Dekker's Green is part of his Circle Series and he notes that this book can be read first or last as part of that circle. Since I read it last, I had to skim back over Black, Red, and White to understand the circle theory and place Green into the circle's sequence.

Thomas Hunter, the main character, continues to travel between the past and the future with dire consequences to both worlds. In the histories, the fall of mankind keeps good and evil in the spiritual realm. But, in the future world, good and evil can be seen, touched and tasted until mankind once again rejects that reality creating apocalyptic results.

The circle's story continues with the The Books of History Chronicles broken down into two additional series: The Lost Books (Chosen, Infidel, Renegade, Chaos) and The Paradise Novels (Showdown, Saint, Sinner).