One Perfect Christmas

by Paige Toon

[Leah]

After finising Paige Toon’s latest novel One Perfect Summer, I immediately rushed to my Kindle to read the short story sequel to the novel, One Perfect Christmas. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of One Perfect Summer. I didn’t like Alice very much, and I felt it was a re-telling of Pictures of Lily but in a different setting. Plus, the ending was horribly abrupt. One Perfect Christmas goes a little way to patching up the rough ending, but, really, Toon should have just held her horses and wrote a full-length sequel rather than bowing to fans demands and rushing out a short story sequel that takes all of 10 minutes to read.

It does feel as though One Perfect Christmas was a filler. That at some point in the future, we will see Alice and Joe again in some capacity. I’ll be honest, I found it too short to really get to know Alice and Joe in a relationship after so much time apart. I thought it all seemed a bit too perfect. Yes, they loved each other very much — at 18. We’re now meant to believe that nearly 10 years on, they still feel exactly the same and that they haven’t changed at all since they were teens. I don’t want to sound as if I’m on a downer as Toon is a brilliant, brilliant author, I just felt that this novella and its prequel were a bit idealistic.

All I will say, is that I hope The Longest Holiday gets Toon back to her best, back to the best I know she can produce. The good news is that it seems it will. The first chapter is at the end of One Perfect Christmas, and I like Laura already, so bonus. One Perfect Summer and One Perfect Christmas just weren’t to my liking, sadly. They just weren’t as good as Toon’s previous 5 novels.