Series: Life in Icicle Falls

Review: Christmas on Candy Cane Lane by Sheila Roberts

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: Christmas on Candy Cane Lane by Sheila RobertsChristmas on Candy Cane Lane (Life in Icicle Falls, #8) by Sheila Roberts
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Life in Icicle Falls #8
Pages: 400
Published by Mira on October 27th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Icicle Falls is the place to be at Christmas…
Everyone's getting ready for Christmas in Icicle Falls, especially on Candy Cane Lane, where holiday decorating is taken very seriously. Tilda Morrison, town cop, is looking forward to celebrating Christmas in her first house… until she discovers that she's expected to "keep up" with the neighbors, including Maddy Donaldson, the inspiration behind the whole extravaganza. But this year, someone's destroying Maddie's precious candy canes! Thank goodness for the cop in their neighborhood.
Tilda already has her hands full trying to sort out her love life and fix up her fixer-upper. Oh, and won't it be fun to have the family over for Christmas dinner? Not really… Then there's her neighbor, Ivy Bohn. As a newly single mom, Ivy can sum up the holiday in two words: Bah, humbug. But she's determined to give her kids a perfect Christmas.
Despite family disasters, irritating ex-husbands and kitchen catastrophes, these three women are going to find out that Christmas really is the most wonderful time of the year!

My Review:

This is a story about what happens when you live next to the Griswold family from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Or at least you feel like you do. When the plastic trappings of Christmas become way more important than any spirit of Christmas whatsoever, you have a recipe for disaster. And comedy.

This entry in the Life in Icicle Falls series is set on Candy Cane Lane, and one of the story threads follows the woman who makes it all happen. Literally. Maddy Donaldson is the person who petitioned the village to change the name of the street to Candy Cane Lane in the first place, and she’s the person responsible for making sure that every resident has their holiday lighting display dialed up to 11. She’s also the cheerleader and organizer who schedules every single woman on the street to serve as Mrs. Claus, standing out in the cold and snow and giving away free candy canes to the carloads of mostly local tourists who come to see Candy Cane Lane in all its electric glory.

(There are plenty of real places that do Christmas to the nth degree the way that Candy Cane Lane does, The Sauganash neighborhood in Chicago is fairly famous, or infamous, in the Chicagoland area.)

But Mandy is so busy organizing the neighborhood, whether they like it or not, that she doesn’t see how often she breaks promises to her husband and daughter in order to play Mrs. Claus or chivvy the neighbors into more holiday spirit. If some of those neighbors are turning to other types of holiday spirits in order to avoid her, she misses that, too.

Mandy isn’t the only woman on Candy Cane Lane having a little difficulty seeing the Christmas around her. Ivy Boch is spending her first Christmas alone. Last December 26, her husband said he’d had enough of being tied down, and left. Now they are sharing custody of their two little kids, and sharing a rather separate misery. Their daughter has written to Santa that all she wants for Christmas is her Daddy back home. Ex-husband Rob has finally figured out that he was a jerk and an idiot, and wants to come home. But Ivy isn’t sure she can trust him again, and who can blame her?

Icicle Falls Police Office Tilda Morrison has just bought a fixer-upper house on Candy Cane Lane. Her love life is non-existent, and she’s decided to quit waiting and just get on with her life. One problem is that her fixer-upper needs way more fixing up than she thought. Her second problem is that one of the local bad boys, Devon Black, would love for Tilda to take him on as her very own personal handyman and fixer upper. And if that wasn’t enough, her new neighbors expect her to solve the sudden rash of Christmas decoration vandals that is ruining everyone’s Christmas displays, right along with Mandy’s and Tilda’s Christmases.

Something needs to change on Candy Cane Lane, or no one is going to have a very merry Christmas.

Merry Ex-Mas by Sheila RobertsEscape Rating B: Just like the previous entry in this series, A Wedding on Primrose Street (reviewed here), Christmas on Candy Cane Lane reads more as women’s fiction than it does a romance. The emphasis in this story is on women’s friendships and women’s relationships, including the fractured relationship between Maddy and her daughter, the tenuous friendship that grows up between Ivy and Tilda, and Tilda’s loving but sometimes contentious relationship with her mother Dot.

Also like a previous holiday entry in the series, Merry Ex-Mas (my personal favorite in Icicle Falls), the women are dealing with the men in their lives at very different stages in those relationships. Maddy and Alan are harried but generally happy with each other; Ivy and Rob are divorced but nothing has been resolved, and Tilda and Devon are still dancing around whether they will have a relationship or not.

Each of the women is in the middle of a crisis. Maddy’s daughter Jordan has become a teenager with a vengeance, and their formerly good relationship is strained by Jordan’s mood swings and increasingly bad attitudes. Ivy is having a meltdown between managing her shop, taking care of her kids, and feeling lonely and stressed to the max. Tilda is worried about her mother, who ends up in the hospital, and has a never-ending series of house-related messes.

Seemingly no one is perfectly happy. But they all get through, often by helping each other. And in the end, they each find out what is really important at Christmas. And the rest of the year.

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Review: A Wedding on Primrose Street by Sheila Roberts

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: A Wedding on Primrose Street by Sheila RobertsA Wedding on Primrose Street (Life in Icicle Falls, #7) by Sheila Roberts
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Life in Icicle Falls #7
Pages: 384
Published by Mira on July 28th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

There's nothing like a wedding!
The joy, the fun, the memories—the stress. As a wedding planner, Anne Richardson has seen mothers of the bride turn into Momzillas, and she's determined not to do that when it's her daughter's turn to get married. But once Laney gets engaged, all bets are off. Anne becomes obsessed with giving Laney the perfect wedding she herself never had. And that wedding needs to be held in Icicle Falls at Primrose Haus, the perfect setting.
Roberta Gilbert, owner of Primrose Haus, has been hosting events at her charming Victorian for thirty years. She's an expert on weddings, but not on mother-daughter relations. When her daughter, Daphne, comes home and decides to help with the business, the receptions become truly memorable—and not in a good way. Then there's the added complication of Roberta's gardener, who seems more interested in Daphne than he is in planting primroses…
Tying the knot is a business that has everyone tied up in knots!

My Review:

Although there are a lot of weddings in this entry into the Life in Icicle Falls series, this one isn’t really a romance. The weddings are all for romances that have already reached their happily ever after, we hope. Or to paraphrase one of the wedding planners, her job is to create a perfect wedding, a perfect marriage is not in her job description. Or capability.

Instead of a romance, this story is all about relationships. Specifically, mother/daughter relationships. And it’s mostly about the number of ways they go wrong, although things do get straightened out before the end. Mostly.

The story centers around two women who are both in the business of perfect weddings. Anne Richardson is a Seattle wedding planner who has just found out that her daughter Laney is engaged. Anne wants Laney to have the perfect wedding, a day that she will remember for the rest of her life with no regrets.

Roberta Gilbert is the owner of Primrose Haus in Icicle Falls. Roberta rents out the beautiful Victorian house for perfectly beautiful weddings, and helps coordinate the services of the caterers, florists and all the other myriad minions needed to pull off the event of a lifetime. But Roberta’s daughter Daphne is back home after her third failed marriage. Daphne wants to help her mother in the business and take few weeks or even months to get her life back on track.

Both Anne’s relationship with Laney and Roberta’s relationship with Daphne go through many trials by fire as the two mothers get together to create the perfect wedding for Laney. The only problems are that Roberta really doesn’t want her disappointing daughter Daphne anywhere near her business, and Laney (and her fiancee) don’t want anything like the wedding that Anne has her heart set on.

Readers get a ringside seat as both sets of mothers and daughters have to struggle their way through to a happily ever after for their relationships, as each of the older women has to reconcile themselves to the regrets in their own pasts before they can repair the present, and hopefully the future.

Although love does help conquer all, in this story, it’s really truth and understanding that finally win the day.

Escape Rating A-: Unlike most of the series so far, A Wedding on Primrose Street is a lot more women’s fiction than anything like a romance. There are a couple of romances that get off the ground in this story, but they are background to the main event. That main event is the relationships between mothers and daughters in both Anne’s and Roberta’s families.

Roberta ran away from home in the early 1960s, a pregnant high schooler whose boyfriend abandoned her and whose mother cared much more about her standing in the community than the plight of her daughter and future grandchild. Roberta’s escape to Icicle Falls to have her child was the best thing that ever happened to her. But she never did resolve issues with her own mother, and while she loved her daughter Daphne, held her to such high standards that Daphne never felt capable. When Daphne comes home, all Roberta sees is another result of her daughter’s terrible choices, and another round of disappointment. As far as Roberta is concerned, the only thing that Daphne has done right is to successfully raise her own now-adult daughter.

When Daphne comes home and wants to help her mother, who is in her early 70s and needs to slow down a bit, all Roberta sees is an endless series of business disasters until Daphne falls in love with another loser. She doesn’t see her own part in Daphne’s issues, nor does she see the woman that Daphne has become.

Anne Richardson, although more of a generation with Daphne than Roberta, has also spent her life in a tug of war with her daughter and her own past. Anne always wanted the traditional big church wedding, but married in haste at the courthouse when she found out she was pregnant, and that her fiancee was due to ship out with the Army for the Middle East. Anne is very happily married, but has always regretted that hasty wedding. She’s determined to pull out all the stops for Laney’s wedding, whether Laney wants those stops pulled or not. Laney is just young enough to want to please her mother, even knowing that what her mother wants is not what she wants. Laney is caught in the middle between her mother-the-steamroller and her fiancee who wants to have a destination wedding in Vegas. A wedding that is much more in line with Laney’s (and Drake’s) artistic and very non-traditional life and tastes.

Anne turns into something she dreads, a “Momzilla” and Laney runs and hides from the preparations she doesn’t want. It takes an intervention for Anne to be forced to look at what she is doing to her relationship with her daughter. And her husband.

This is a story that got me in the feels. The ways that things go right and wrong seems so true to life, that it hit too close to home, and to my own issues with my mother. So it was sometimes a rough go for me, not because it wasn’t a good story (it definitely is good) but because it often felt too real.

A Wedding on Primrose Street is a terrific story for anyone who has unresolved issues with their mother, but still wants to see a happy ending. And don’t we all?

Review: The Lodge on Holly Road by Sheila Roberts

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Lodge on Holly Road by Sheila RobertsThe Lodge on Holly Road (Life in Icicle Falls, #6) by Sheila Roberts
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Life in Icicle Falls #6
Pages: 368
Published by Harlequin MIRA on October 28th 2014
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

How Santa Gets His Christmas Spirit Back…
James Claussen has played Santa for years, but now that he's a widower, he's lost interest—in everything. So his daughter, Brooke, kidnaps him from the mall (in his Santa suit!) and takes him to Icicle Falls. She's arranged a special Christmas at the lodge owned by long-widowed Olivia Wallace and her son, Eric. And yet…Brooke wants Dad to be happy, but she's not ready to see someone else's mommy kissing Santa Claus.
Single mom Missy Monroe brings her kids to the lodge, too. Lalla wants a grandma for Christmas, and her brother, Carlos, wants a dog. Missy can't provide either one. What she'd like is an attractive, dependable man. A man like John Truman… But John's girlfriend will be joining him in Icicle Falls, and he's going to propose.
Of course not everything goes as planned. But sometimes the best gifts are the ones you don't expect!

My Review:

I pulled The Lodge on Holly Road out of the virtually towering TBR pile because I’m scheduled to review the 8th book in this series, Christmas on Candy Cane Lane, early in November. I totally forgot that Holly Road was last year’s Christmas book in the Life in Icicle Falls series. So I get two heaping helpings of Christmas spirit in time for the upcoming holidays.

Merry Ex-Mas by Sheila RobertsWhile Merry Ex-Mas is still my favorite Christmas book in this series, at least so far, The Lodge on Holly Road was definitely a tasty treat.

The first thing readers need to know about this series is that Icicle Falls is really Leavenworth, Washington, a small tourist town that really did change its look to make it seem like something out of an idealized Bavarian Forest. It is just this cute, and in the location relative to Seattle described in the book.

The Lodge on Holly Road is a bed and breakfast in Icicle Falls. In this story, the Lodge is open for its regular Christmas package, but the guests that arrive for this particular Christmas make the holiday a special treat for everyone involved.

Olivia Wallace owns the Lodge, and she and her oldest son Eric run the place. Her younger son Brandon drops in every once in awhile, especially at the holidays. Brandon is still making a way for himself, which currently involves traveling around the U.S. searching out the best ski resorts. He’s a teacher and trainer, but it does seem like a bit of an excuse to be a “ski bum”.

Olivia has been a widow for 14 years, and Eric, as much as he’d like to settle down and get married, hasn’t found the right woman in the small town he loves. And as he and his friends lament at the beginning of the story, most women who visit Icicle Falls from Seattle or wherever live in those other places because they don’t want to actually live in a small and sometimes remote place like Icicle Falls.

Brooke Claussen just wants her dad to recapture not just his Christmas spirit, but a little bit of his spirit in general. As James Claussen often spends the holidays as a department store Santa, he really needs a little Christmas, but has lost his heart. His wife (and Brooke’s mother) died last Christmas Eve after a long struggle with cancer. In his grief, James has turned inward and is shutting himself off from the world.

One of the really sweet things in this story is that Olivia and James are pretty much perfect for each other, and it is especially lovely to see their burgeoning romance take a chunk of the center stage in this multi-romance holiday treat. It’s also good that Brooke and Eric both have their own experiences with caretaking and jealousy, and need to figure out what their places are in their parents’ lives, and what place they might find in each other’s life as well.

But the heart of the story revolves around poor deluded John Truman, and Missy Monroe, the single mother he rescues on the way to Icicle Falls a couple of nights before Christmas.

John believes that his big city girlfriend, Holland, will just love Icicle Falls, the vacation he has meticulously planned, and the engagement ring he plans to present to her on Christmas Eve. It is pretty obvious to the reader and most of the other guests at Holly Lodge that John is seriously deluding himself, but as is so often said, “love is blind”. In Truman’s case, it’s even blind that what he feels is love.

Missy Monroe is a single mother with two young children by different fathers. She’s the first to admit that her choices in men have not been stellar, but her children are the light of her life and she is doing her best to raise them with much more love and care than she received from her alcoholic mother. Missy’s problem is money. It’s pretty clear that she isn’t collecting any child support, and her wages and tips at the low-end beauty salon where she does hair isn’t enough to make ends even wave at each other, let alone meet.

Missy has saved all year long to give her kids a beautiful Christmas someplace nice. But the presents that Carlos and Lalla want are beyond her budget and control. Carlos wants a dog that she’s not allowed to have in their apartment. And Lalla wants a grandma, which is even harder to magic up.

As John Truman finds himself more and more alone on what should have been a romantic holiday, he spends more and more time with Missy and her kids. Missy sees instantly that John is just the kind of man that she would love to be with – he’s caring, sincere, funny, willing to try new things and most of all, loyal. That he’s a stable accountant and not a flake doesn’t hurt either. But all the things that Missy likes about John, including his steadiness and his desire to settle down in a small town just like Icicle Falls, are all the things that his erstwhile fiance finds boring, if not downright low-class.

The Christmas miracle in this story is that everyone who comes to the Lodge on Holly Road this Christmas finds their happily ever after, no matter how remote a prospect it seemed at the beginning. There’s even a puppy and a grandma for Missy’s kids.

Escape Rating B+: Everyone gets what they need for this Christmas, even if (or especially because) it wasn’t what they thought they wanted. I also liked the way that Olivia and James’ romance was treated. We so seldom see romances that feature, frankly, anyone over 40, let alone anyone around 60. While both of their children have issues seeing their living parents with someone other than their dead parents, the fact is that 60 isn’t dead and they both have plenty to give a new partner that doesn’t take anything away from each of their happy first marriages or their relationships with their kids.

It was icing on the cake that when Eric and Brooke stopped squabbling over their parents getting together, they discovered that their parents had the right idea. The two families do belong together, and Eric has as much in common with Brooke as his mother does with her dad.

Icicle Falls is always lovely, and when John Truman’s would-be fiance Holland finally gets there and acts like the whole place is beneath her, we all know she’s evil and he needs to find someone who will love him as he is. Not wanting to go out clubbing every weekend is not a character flaw. And when he finally figures out that he was just Holland’s “starter boyfriend” in a new city and that now that she knows her way around she’s ready to trade him up for someone flashier, we know he’s WAY better off without her, whether he gets the clue to start a relationship with Missy or not.

While it is not necessary to have read the previous books in the series to enjoy The Lodge on Holly Road, the ambiance of Icicle Falls provides a nice backdrop for this story. We get to catch up with a few people that we’ve already met, but those old favorites are a side note to a story that is all about the newbies in town and in the story.

For a tasty bite of Christmas cheer, The Lodge on Holly Road is a lovely story. And Olivia’s mouth watering recipes for her Lodge will make you hungry for a holiday getaway of your own.