The Boys of Christmas by Jane Lovering
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What a wonderfully Christmassy tale! Mattie is running away from a nasty controlling relationship. Her aunt has left her a house, on the condition that she scatters her ashes (the aunt’s, I mean) over ‘the boys of Christmas’. Mattie and her best friend Toby end up in the spooky old house, in the middle of a snow storm, just before Christmas trying to figure out just who these ‘boys of Christmas’ are.
There’s snow, freezing archaeologists, some excellent sentences that Toby will never say again and a knitted octopus called Cthulu. I actually laughed out loud a couple of times (much to the annoyance of my daughter, who thought I was concentrating on Thomas the Tank Engine).
I really enjoyed this story. It was short enough that I could read it in one day and it was funny enough to make me laugh. What more could you want from a Christmas story?
As always, the disclaimer. Jane is a friend and we write for the same publisher, but I was a fan of her books before I even met her.
Rhoda Baxter 