Review for Twelve Days of Christmas by Trisha Ashley

"Christmas has always been a sad time for young widow Holly Brown, so when she's asked to look after a remote house on the Lancashire moors, the opportunity to hide herself away is irresistible – the perfect excuse to forget about the festivities. Sculptor, Jude Martland, is determined that this year there will be no Christmas after his brother runs off with his fiancée and he is keen to avoid the family home. However, he will have to return by the twelfth night of the festivities, when the hamlet of Little Mumming hold their historic festivities and all of his family are required to attend. Meanwhile, Holly is finding that if she wants to avoid Christmas, she has come to the wrong place. When Jude unexpectedly returns on Christmas Eve he is far from delighted to discover that Holly seems to be holding the very family party he had hoped to avoid. Suddenly, the blizzards come out of nowhere and the whole village is snowed in. With no escape, Holly and Jude get much more than they bargained for – it looks like the twelve days of Christmas are going to be very interesting indeed!" What first attracted me to Twelve Days of Christmas was that it sounded very much like one of my all-time favourite Christmas films “The Holiday” with it being about house sitting over Christmas time so I was very excited to start reading this when the snow started to fall and I was really getting into that Christmas Spirit, and well, I guess I’m just going to come out and say it. I didn’t like this book. The story centres around 35 year old Holly Brown and the main problem I had with this book is that I didn’t get on with Holly- not because she was annoying or nasty or anything like that she was nice enough but she was also incredibly boring and dull. I just didn’t have anything in common with her and couldn’t warm towards her. It was a bit like meeting somebody at a party who seems like a nice enough person but you’d never actually be friends with them because you don’t have anything in common. Holly spends 400 odd pages either cooking, looking after the animals or “thawing off” a HUGELY over used phrase in this book, which is all fine and well if that wasn’t all that she done in excessive detail. I like food and animals as much as the next person but I really don’t need a running commentary especially when it came to the cooking. Holly spends 80 per cent of her time cooking and not being a keen cook myself I found a huge chunk of this book very tiresome. Holly was for me a rather boring character who I just try as I might couldn’t connect with. I also really didn’t enjoy Trisha Ashley’s writing style. It struck me as rather old fashioned and everyone was rather sensible and proper even nearly a teen Jess who really didn’t act like a modern day teenager and behaved more like her gran! That being said this book wasn’t all bad. Some aspects of the plot kept me interested and I rather liked some of the secondary characters. Twelve days of Christmas is one of those books with a great story idea but it just isn’t executed well. I did wonder at some points if it would be better suited to older readers, with a lot of the main characters being either middle aged or elderly and with the Old fashioned style of writing, but for me as a 20 year old who likes her chick lit funny, fashionable and sexy this book was a bit of a let-down. Although I personally didn’t enjoy it I would recommend it to people fond of their cooking or maybe to a slightly older audience than myself. But as a warming fun read for Christmas? I’d give this one a miss. My first Trisha Ashley book and unfortunately I think this will also be my last. My Rating 2/5 stars ** Synopsis taken from Amazon