Boxing Day Reading

Hello everyone,

If you are anything like me then you'll love spending Boxing Day lounging around reading and recovering from the Christmas dinner food coma! I also like to prolong the magic of Christmas as much as possible, usually I do this by interspersing reading with festive movies. I have often wanted to find a suitably christmassy book to read around this time and this year I did.

My True Love Gave To Me is a compilation of 12 stories based around the festive season by contemporary young adult authors. I picked this up as some of my favourite contemporary authors are contributors, including Gayle Foreman, Jenny Han and Rainbow Rowell.

Two of the stories stood out the most to me, interestingly neither of which were written by the authors that drew me to the book. The Lady and the Fox by Kelly Link and The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer by Laini Taylor. Both of these stories are quite fantastical, they follow two young women who fall in love with mythical creatures/magical beings in their search for freedom from the mundane and their lot in life. I don't want to spoil them for you so I won't give too many details, but these two stories are very atypical romances and could easily have taken a darker turn...

I loved all the stories in this book, not just because they were festive, but for the characters. Each individual person was sculpted so perfectly that I wished all their stories were longer. I could honestly have read a book about each and every one, particularly North and Marigold in Stephanie Perkins' It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown. My only niggle about this book is the cover art and the design. I don't think the pale blue is very festive really and the neon pink page edges are rather garish, the overall effect is of a book aimed at young children and not at the teen/young adult market. It would have been more appealing with festive colours or left as it was, but minus the bright pink! However, we all get taught not to judge a book by it's cover so I will try to ignore it and just love the stories and festive cheer. I think some of the stories will become favourites to be re-read around this time of year!

What are your favourite festive reads? Do you prefer something different, away from the festivities maybe? Let me know in the comments below :-)

xoxo