Author: Nicki Edwards
ISBN: 9781760302153
RRP: $1.00
It’s December and the festive season has begun, it’s in full swing in our house with Christmas get togethers every weekend. It also means time for seasonal offerings and the first Christmas novella for me this year is Operation White Christmas by Nicki Edwards, and part of her Escape the the Country series.
Hollie Douglas is a nurse at Birrangulla Base Hospital, best friends with Mackenzie who we met in Intensive Care and Emergency Response. I have been struggling to remember whether we met Hollie but I don’t think we did, which is a little unusual and it was only a passing reference that tells us Hollie works at Birrangulla.
The Country that Hollie escapes to is far from our little country towns, it is on the other side of the world.
We meet Hollie on the night of her anniversary, two months before her wedding to her high school sweetheart. Finally, after years of failed anniversary celebrations she has it in the bag. Everything is perfect, except she forgot that it was Brownlow night.
Instead of the romantic anniversary evening she envisions Hollie is left stunned and single. Cancelling a wedding is a long and arduous task, made more difficult when plane tickets can’t be cancelled. Hollie ends up deciding to take the honeymoon of her dreams on her own, and heads off to Canada for her first white christmas.
Hollie heads off to Canada and nothing goes to plan, but she is determined to make the best of the situation. Her accommodation has been cancelled and everything close is booked up for Christmas, Hollie manages to secure a booking in a little B&B and heads off by car in a snowstorm.
Rescued by a farmer she ends up spending her vacation on his farm and ticking off all items on her White Christmas bucket list.
Novellas are short, this one comes in at just 87 pages, so it is quite difficult to build a complete story in so few words. It would be quite easy to have two dimensional characters and no story, no background and no build up. Edwards manages to give us quite a slow build up and a sweet romance with no consummation.
There is really only so much we can learn about two characters in 87 pages and Edwards did well to ensure we got to know them well enough to understand their emotional state. She used the limited word count to build a relationship and a connection between the two of them rather than having them fall into bed together and spend their two weeks together that way.
This is a sweet story of new beginnings, healing and moving forward set in the winter wonderland of a Canadian Christmas. I really enjoyed Hollie’s christmas tale and I hope we will get to see her again sometime in a full length story.
I devour books, vampires and supernatural creatures are my genre of choice but over the past couple of years, I have broadened my horizons considerably. In a nutshell – I love to write! I love interacting with a diverse range of artists to bring you interviews. Perhaps we were perfect before – I LOVE WORDS!