Pre-numbered label used for registration.

Reserved for LeishaCamden in response to my book give away offer

Mailed April 19, 2007

This book arrived in the mail from Canada on Saturday, June 9th. Sorry I didn't journal it before now but there's something wrong with my internet access at home at the moment so I can only get online at work. :-(

Thank you for the book, queenfrog! It looks interesting ... judging from the cover it appears to be a quite traditional and 'standard' collection of Christmas stories. (Except the dragon, that is. ;-) But knowing Connie Willis I'd guess it's anything but traditional and typical ... !! ;-)

I'll journal again once I've read the book. Maybe I'll save it for Christmas and read it then. :-) Thanks again, queenfrog!!! :-)

I started reading this on Friday, December 21st. Have read a few of the stories so far ... they are all well written although (as should be expected) some appeal far more to me than others. Good reading for Christmas - thought-provoking stories.

I'll write again when I've finished the book.

I finished this on Saturday, January 19th ... on the bus on my way home from Gothenburg in Sweden where I'd attended a BC meetup. So this book has actually been to Sweden as well, even though there's no 'real' journal entry to prove it ... :-)

It was a good read, not the best of Willis' work that I've read, but I do think that she does better work in novel-length format. Some of these short stories were really long; perhaps a little too long for the format.

Overall it was an enjoyable read, thought-provoking at times and often entertaining. The settings for the stories are very convincing (as I expect from Willis, to be honest :-). I did feel that some of the stories were overlong, this may have been because they dealt with topics which don't interest me and which I find rather meaningless, eg religios epiphanies etc. I was also kind of annoyed by a very obvious factual error in one of the stories - the one in which a choir singer discovers that the two homeless people lurking outside the church doors are actually Mary and Joseph who have wandered through a hole in the space time continuum on their way to Bethlehem (actually does work a lot better than it sounds ;-). Mary in this story is said to be in her early teens, which would have been correct ... but then Joseph is basically her age, which is patently ridiculous. Joseph would have been twice Mary's age - if she was 14, he'd have been more like 30. Absolutely no way would he have been a teenager. I found this, well, annoying, in a word, because it so ruined the believability of what would otherwise have been a very good story.

But as a whole the book was definitely worth reading. It is very well written, like all of Willis' work that I've read (and I'm sure the rest of it as well ;-). Thanks for sharing, queenfrog!!

I will pass the book to a friend of mine (who is not a BookCrosser - yet!! ;-) - but who is a Willis fan and has not read this book.

RELEASE NOTES:

I gave this to NyxRo (my aforementioned friend who is now a BCer! :-) at meetup this afternoon. Happy reading!! :-)