Comfort & Joy

"Christmas parties are the star on the top of my "don't" list this year. Other things to avoid this season: Ornaments. Trees. Mistletoe (definitely). Holiday movies about families. And memories."
This is the first paragraph in Kristin Hannah's Comfort & Joy. I read this as book number one for the Christmas theme book challenge hosted by Susan. It was a very quick enjoyable Christmas read. I like to read a book or two like this every year and I enjoyed this one more than I have any in the last couple of years. It started out as your typical bah-humbug Christmas story ~ Joy had had a very rough year, coming home one day to find her much loved sister in bed with her husband, so Christmas this year was going to be an awful holiday, filled with sad memories and no family to share the burden with. "Sometimes in the last year, , I've thought that my color was washing away in the shower or fading in the sun. I wouldn't have been surprised to wake up one morning and find myself a black-and-white woman moving through a colored world." Coming home the afternoon of the last day of school, (Joy is a librarian at the local high school), she finds her sister waiting for her with a wedding invitation and the news that she is pregnant. Joy speeds off, finding her self at the airport and on a whim buys a ticket on a puddle jumper plane to Hope, somewhere in Canada. From here the story takes an unexpected and much needed twist, holding the readers attention and keeping you reading late into the night. I'm not going to tell more, keeping the twist a secret for those of you who would like to read this one. Pick it up, it is a wonderful, engaging Christmas tale.