A VERY NANTUCKET CHRISTMAS – Nancy Thayer
Ballantine Books
ISBN: 978-1-101-88481-2
November 2015
Holiday Contemporary Romances

These two short novels from the past are united in a new edition. We're combining our reviews of them, both set on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

A Nantucket Christmas
On Nantucket Island lives a small dog named Snix.  Hungry and wandering, he's looking for his lost family, but until he finds them, he just searches for food and shelter, ducking into corners away from people who consider him simply a scruffy, stray dog...

Also living on Nantucket Island is the widowed Nicole, who recently married Sebastian Somerset.  A retired nurse, Nicole has come to love living on the island with her new husband, a divorced and retired attorney who brings a past to their marriage in the form of a beautiful, controlling ex-wife, and an equally calculating and spoiled grown-up daughter.  As the holiday season draws closer, Sebastian's ex-wife, Katya, decides to spend Christmas with her lover, thus leaving their daughter, Kennedy, with no option but to spend Christmas week on Nantucket with Sebastian and his new wife.

And so, Kennedy and her husband James arrive in Nantucket with their four-year-old son, Maddox.  Kennedy is heavily pregnant, so she won't be much help around the house for the week they are staying, but Nicole is on top of the situation and prepared for everything, even Kennedy's willful manipulations and sabotage.

A Nantucket Christmas is a wonderfully inspiring story of Christmas and the warmth of the season.  This is Nicole's very first Christmas with Sebastian, and she's more than determined to keep Kennedy from ruining their holiday.  Even so, her quiet patience is put to the test when surprise visitors invite themselves to her new home.  And, in the background, Snix is still lost and alone, looking for a home and someone who cares.

A Nantucket Christmas is a truly warm and loving novella, a beautiful book for the keeper shelf! ~ Reviewed by Diana Risso in 2013

An Island Christmas

December on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts

Jilly Gordon has very mixed feelings. She's glad Felicia, her younger daughter, is getting married and that she wants to come home to Nantucket Island for the wedding before leaving to continue her life of travel and adventure. But Felicia and Archie's base is in the West, and they are always climbing mountains or running rapids or the like. They do it for fun as well as to make a living guiding others. Jilly would rather Felicia marry someone closer to home, someone more like the man Lauren, her elder daughter, married.

The two sisters could not be more different. Always a tomboy, Felicia loves her life with her big, tough Archie and would rather have a simple ceremony on a mountain top somewhere, but she loves her mother and the rest of her family on Nantucket. So to please them, her perfectionist mother especially, they will be wed on Nantucket on Christmas day. Her sister, who is much like her mother, offers to help in any way, even to the point of making Felicia's dress.

Jilly ponders inviting her new neighbor Steven—the boy who took Felicia to their high school prom—to the pre-holiday festivities. You never can tell what might happen. . .

This family tale features many wonderful characters: Felicia and Archie; Felicia's parents, Jilly and George; her sister and her sister's husband and their two children; Archie's mother from Florida; old friends, and even the cat, a newcomer to the Gordon family, who stirs things up no small bit. An Island Christmas packs a lot of story in under 210 pages. You can count on it for a thoroughly entertaining—and sometimes exciting—read for this holiday season…or anytime at all. ~ Reviewed by Jane Bowers in 2014.