My True Love Gave to Me
by Stephanie Parker (editor)
It’s a total crapshoot to buy a collection of holiday short stories; most people will buy anything remotely associated with Christmas, so the quality doesn’t need to be particularly high in order to make a profit. In My True Love Gave to Me, twelve holiday stories range from realistic to completely fantastic, and from terrible to lovely.
All of these stories feature young adult protagonists, so if you’re not in the mood to read about teenagers falling in love, find yourself a different collection. Most of the stories have abrupt endings, with the exception of my favorite, “Welcome to Christmas, CA” by Kiersten White. A young girl works at a greasy spoon with dreams of escaping her hick town, but the spirit of the season, and a new chef, might help her find more than she’s looking for. This story has a clear beginning, middle, and end, one that actually made me tear up during the final paragraph.
One unusual commonality all twelve stories shared was the lack of a Hallmark-esque happy ending. In each story, the protagonist finds a sliver of happiness within a pretty lousy situation. Everyone either lives within a mess that doesn’t get cleaned or the main conflict of the story doesn’t exactly get solved. The happiness has the smell of “take what you can get because it’s Christmas” to it, which might be a sign of the times or might be what editor Stephanie Parker assigned to her twelve authors.
All of these stories feature young adult protagonists, so if you’re not in the mood to read about teenagers falling in love, find yourself a different collection. Most of the stories have abrupt endings, with the exception of my favorite, “Welcome to Christmas, CA” by Kiersten White. A young girl works at a greasy spoon with dreams of escaping her hick town, but the spirit of the season, and a new chef, might help her find more than she’s looking for. This story has a clear beginning, middle, and end, one that actually made me tear up during the final paragraph.
One unusual commonality all twelve stories shared was the lack of a Hallmark-esque happy ending. In each story, the protagonist finds a sliver of happiness within a pretty lousy situation. Everyone either lives within a mess that doesn’t get cleaned or the main conflict of the story doesn’t exactly get solved. The happiness has the smell of “take what you can get because it’s Christmas” to it, which might be a sign of the times or might be what editor Stephanie Parker assigned to her twelve authors.