Book #31: Santa Maybe (Whitney Book 11)

Title: Santa Maybe
Author: Audrey Mace

Abbie has everything she needs in life-- she owns a successful bakery, she adores her nieces and nephew, she has plenty of friends. She's also been in love hundreds of times, but none of those romances has ever stuck. On the advice of her sister, Grace, Abbie decides to ask Santa for a man. And she gets him, waking up on Christmas morning with the perfect guy under the Christmas tree. Only the perfect guy claims to have amnesia, and Abbie can't tell whether or not he's telling the truth.

Santa Maybe was a cute book. Predictable, yes, but not bad. It's an easy read at 180 pages, and something I might crawl into bed with on a chilly winter night to pass a couple of pleasant hours. It's entertaining. Abbie is actually a fairly interesting character, and has to go through a bit of inner struggle to decide whether or not she really wants what she thinks she does. It's also only the second book I've read in the romance category, and unlike the other one, Santa Maybe didn't make me feel like I wanted to vomit and/or slit my wrists.

But the review wouldn't be complete without a little bit of criticism. First of all, although the book was published by Cedar Fort and marketed toward an LDS audience, there's absolutely no mention of Abbie's religion until about halfway through the book. Suddenly, it's Sunday, and Abbie's lying in bed, and her sister's encouraging her to stay there. And I'm thinking, okay, this must be one of those books where the character's not overtly LDS, since we're 100 pages in and she's staying in bed on Sunday. But suddenly she's at the singles ward, and the book becomes very Mormon. I felt like Mace should have decided and defined at the outset that Abbie was LDS and this was a Mormon book, because it felt a little like being dropped into a place that I didn't think the book was going. Also, it drove me nuts that Mace never designated a setting for the book. Just some anonymous town somewhere in America. I wanted a town with a name-- it would give the story more credence. Maybe it was intentional (since Santa does play a rather hefty role in the book, albeit behind the scenes), but that part bugged me.