The Mother of all Christmases - Milly Johnson

Description

Eve Glace - co-owner of the theme park Winterworld - is having a baby and her due date is a perfectly timed 25th December. And she’s decided that she and her husband Jacques should renew their wedding vows with all the pomp that was missing the first time.  But growing problems at Winterworld keep distracting them …

Annie Pandoro and her husband Joe own a small Christmas cracker factory, are well set up and happy together despite life never blessing them with a much-wanted child.  But when Annie finds that the changes happening to her body aren’t typical of the menopause but pregnancy, her joy is uncontainable.

Palma Collins has agreed to act as a surrogate, hoping the money will get her out of the gutter in which she finds herself.  But when the couple she is helping split up, is she going to be left carrying a baby she never intended to keep?

Annie, Palma and Eve all meet at the ‘Christmas Pudding Club’, a new directive started by a forward-thinking young doctor to help mums-to-be mingle and share their pregnancy journeys. Will this group help each other to find love, contentment and peace as Christmas approaches?

Review

What can I say? - this is another great read from Milly Johnson. It was really nice when reading the book and as characters were introduced I was thinking - I know her!  I haven't yet read all Milly's back catalogue but I did recognise some of the characters from other books. I felt right at home amongst everyone. It can absolutely be read as a standalone novel, it was just fun to know the back story of some of the characters.

Milly has had a varied life and this shows in her writing; and what she doesn't know about she researches, like the cracker factory some of the girls in the book work at. It was all so realistic and down to earth and I felt like I knew people like this in real life.

As is the norm for her books there is a lot of humour, but there are also some sad and poignant parts which did bring a tear to my eye. The other thing is the excerpts from the "Daily Trumpet" the local paper that cannot report a story correctly to save its life! I even read some of these out loud to my partner as you didn't have to be reading the book to enjoy them. Right at the end of the book are loads and loads of Christmas cracker jokes - and I hadn't heard most of them either - very funny.

Although this is a Christmas book not all the story is set at Christmas and it would be a good read any time of the year. The main thing that pulls the story lines together is the pregnant ladies and their membership of the Christmas Pudding Club. 

My only reservation is the title - if it hadn't been by Milly it would not have been on my radar. She does explain at the end of the book that it was going to be called The Christmas Pudding Club at one point as she had a previous novel The Yorkshire Pudding Club which was written from her own pregnancy diaries.

I'm giving this book 5 out of 5 stars. My thanks to Netgalley for a ARC to review.