Together by Christmas

This is one of my favourite christmas books so far. It is entertaining, cute, easy to read, but not predictable. It offers character development, love in all its forms and some life lessons.

This book was definitely NOT what I was looking (and hoping) for: an easy to read book full of love, longing and harmony and that little touch of Christmas magic. - The rest of this review might come as a SPOILER to you - Instead, I read about a former war photographer that deals with PTSD and tries to suppress feelings that come with memories and people while being a single parent for a five-year-old who doesn't act age appropriately many times throughout the book (deals with his mom's nightmares without being traumatized himself, watches Star Wars like every night and writes whole sentences without a spelling mistake). To be honest, I did not read every page of the book. There are lots of instances where Lee, the MC, dreams or talks with her (seemingly useless) therapist about the things that happened on her last trip to Syria when she was left alone with a jihadist. Well WHO could have expected bad things to happen in such a situation... I just couldn't stand all this talk about war, death, hate, loss, sexual abuse and many other bad things and felt like beeing tricked into reading about the world's problems when all I wanted was to escape this world's problems for some hours. It also didn't add to my reading motivation that unnecessarily there were even more really really bad things happening in the story and that I felt like I always knew what would happen next while the author seemingly thought it was all very mysterious. It was a real nuisance, and there were several times where I thought JUST SPIT IT OUT ALREADY, and not in this I'm-so-excited-what-happens-next way. And finally, the end was completely far-fetched, all the problems solved over night and everyone forgiving everyone, even things I could never forgive (seriously, Sam, go to hell). After finishing the book (which I did because I wanted to know for sure who's Jasper's dad), I read that the author completely wrote or rewrote the book within 2 or 3 weeks. I'm sorry, but that explains a lot.