AN ISLAND CHRISTMAS – Nancy Thayer
Ballantine Books
ISBN: 978-0-553-39387-3
November 2014
Women's Fiction (A Tale of Family)

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. . .

I call this a family tale rather than a romance as it 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.

Jane Bowers