Sunday 29 November 2015

Book Review - Four Weddings and a White Christmas by Jenny Oliver - #CarinaChristmas

Amazon UK
Title: Four Weddings and a White Christmas
Author: Jenny Oliver
Format reviewed: Ebook
Source: Netgalley
Publisher: Carina
Publication Date: 8th October 2015
Rating: 4 Stars


Welcome back to Cherry Pie Island…the most delicious place to spend Christmas!

Hannah’s holidays are normally spent nibbling chocolate coins with her daughter and praying she’s not too old for a stocking on Christmas morning. But this year, she’s been offered the dressmaker’s job of a lifetime: creating a one-of-a-kind a gown for her friend Annie’s Christmas wedding on the picture-perfect Cherry Pie Island.

Many mince pies and one hot-pink organza dress later, Hannah is set to snuggle back into her old routine…until she discovers that there are three more weddings to come – and not a dress in sight!

Four themes, four brides and four parties spent avoiding chef Harry Fontaine, whose cynicism is as much a wedding day guarantee as confetti and cake. Hannah has her work cut out for her! Yet, with a sprinkling of snowflakes and Christmas magic, it could be that this is the year when miracles really do happen…if Hannah will let them.

Celebrate four very special weddings with Jenny Oliver in the soon-to-be Christmas classic: Four Weddings and a White Christmas. Four very good reasons to get out in the snow and fall in love!

I'm sorry to say that although I read the first of the Cherry Pie Island series, I somehow missed out on reading the others, and at the point I spotted this Christmas book, I just haven't had the time to go back and catch up, and decided to see how much it mattered that I had missed out on parts of the series. 

Thankfully Four Weddings and a White Christmas does work as what I have to assume is the series finale, to Cherry Pie Island, as a standalone. From my point of view, its a lovely story highlighting four weddings and of course including a White Christmas in there too. 

Having glanced at the blurbs of the rest of the series, I am coming to the conclusion, that the four weddings features in this book, are the "happy ever afters" for the four focal characters one in each of the previous books, and thus the more of them you have read, the more invested you probably are in this final book. 

This is Hannah and Harry's story. Hannah is a talented dressmaker, who has just finished getting her degree, and is offered the chance to make Annie's Christmas Kistch themed wedding dress. From that one she then gets further commissions. Hannah's Christmases tend to include a lot of last minute dress making, but she doesn't really mind, and she is really into a family Christmas, with daughter Jemima, 5, and all the extended family around her. 

Harry on the other hand, lives in New York, is a top chef and very stubborn and set in his ways, and all he wants for the perfect Christmas is solitude and not with his family.

Harry and Hannah are very different but yet after some chance meetings at the various weddings, they start to get under each others skin. 

I would say the main focus of this book is romance and weddings, more than Christmas, but all the weddings are really different, and offer fabulous contrasts, as do the dresses that Hannah designs. When there is Christmases though, you do start feeling festive with the descriptions, especially with Annie's wedding, which feels like its over the top Christmas themed, but you can't help smiling at it. 

Jemima though is my absolute favourite character. At only 5 years old, you can get a real sense of who she is, and what she will be like when shes older. She takes a real liking to Harry, and the seafood BBQ scene is brilliant, and not what I would have expected seeing, with Harry and Jemima's interactions. 

On the assumption this is the last Cherry Pie Island book, its a fitting and fabulous finale to the series, I just wish I had read others from it first!

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Carina for this review copy. This is my honest opinion. 


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