The Gift

Author: Nora Roberts
Published: October 2007 (Silhouette)
Category: Romance
Rating: 6/10

Apparently, all of these stories were previously published, but as I became a Nora Roberts fan relatively recently, that didn't matter to me.

Home for Christmas is about Jason, a journalist who left his tiny hometown to find adventure and success. Ten years later, he returns to claim Faith, the woman he left behind, only to find that she's been divorced and had a baby. This was my favorite of the three stories in the book, and the coziest. It also deals the best with its shortness.

All I Want for Christmas is the cutesy made-for-TV-movie story, with twin elementary school boys trying to find a new mom for their family. Their mother callously abandoned them to their father when they were babies, and he's been doing the best he can to raise them ever since. Nell and Mac, the couple for this story, were kind of blah to me. I'm normally amused by couples who bicker, but they're fighting being together and suddenly they're together. Maybe it would've worked better if the story was longer.

Gabriel's Angel was by far the most dated and my least favorite of the three. Gabriel, an artist trying to find his muse, is holed up in a remote mountain cabin. As a blizzard descends on the area, Laura, a very pregnant woman, crashes her car close by and Gabe takes her in. She's got lots of secrets about her past; she's hiding from her deceased husband's controlling, blue-blooded, entitled family. They want the baby because it belongs with them, not some model who captured the passing fancy of their sleazebag of a son. Of course, they never saw him as a sleazebag, despite his cheating on Laura two days into their marriage and dying in a drunken car accident with his latest mistress. How is this most obviously dated? Gabe smokes cigarettes rather frequently around Laura when pregnant and around the baby later on. Laura does not utter a peep about this.

Both Gabe and Laura have sadness in their pasts, but their hasty marriage has them tiptoeing around each other. They married because they do care about each other, and they want to protect Laura and the baby from his grasping grandparents. But the dancing back and forth with "I want you but I don't want to hurt you or make you think about your crappy dead husband" and the "I want you but I'm afraid of being hurt again or being under the thumb of another rich and powerful family" was so boring. For once, I wished one of these anthology stories was shorter. Give the extra pages to Home for Christmas!

Definitely not my favorite Nora Roberts or Christmas anthology.