Book of the Month - December 2023

Book 1 in her Winter series.  The four novels in the series should be read in order:

The New Woodstock Free Library has all four novels, as well as several others by this author.

“After all, one is only given a certain number of Christmases in one’s life.”

In Elin Hilderbrand’s first Christmas novel, a family gathers on Nantucket for a holiday filled with surprises. Kelley Quinn is the owner of Nantucket’s Winter Street Inn and the proud father of four children, all of them grown and living in varying states of disarray.

Patrick, the eldest, is a hedge fund manager with a guilty conscience. Kevin, a bartender, is secretly sleeping with a French housekeeper named Isabelle. Ava, a schoolteacher, is finally dating the perfect guy but can’t get him to commit and Bart, the youngest and the only child of Kelley’s second marriage to Mitzi, has recently shocked everyone by joining the Marines.

As Christmas approaches, Kelley is looking forward to getting the family together for some quality time at the inn. But when he walks in on Mitzi kissing Santa Claus (or the guy who’s playing Santa at the inn’s annual party), utter chaos descends. With the three older children each reeling in their own dramas and Bart unreachable in Afghanistan, it might be up to Kelley’s ex-wife, nightly news anchor Margaret Quinn, to save Christmas at the Winter Street Inn.

Before the mulled cider is gone, the delightfully dysfunctional Quinn family will survive a love triangle, an unplanned pregnancy, a federal crime, a small house fire, many shots of whiskey, and endless rounds of Christmas caroling, in this heart-warming novel about coming home for the holidays.

USA Today hailed the book as “a diverting tale… filled with humor, romance, and realism”.

Elin Hilderbrand is an American writer, mostly of romance novels, which are typically set on and around Nantucket Island, where she resides. In 2019, New York magazine called Hilderbrand “the queen of beach reads”.

Elin Hilderbrand made a paper angel ornament in third grade that is still in her family’s custody.  She celebrates the holidays by making batches of mustard and chive pine-nut dip and gifting them to her friends.  Her favorite carol is O Holy Night.

Her novel The Perfect Couple was adapted as a miniseries of the same name by the television streaming service Netflix.