Book: A Lot Like Christmas by Connie Willis
Genre: Short Story collection
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Publication date: 2017

Source: E-book borrowed from the library

Summary: Connie Willis writes science fiction. I was feeling kind of done with Christmas romance this year, so this collection of short stories hit the spot.

The stories in A Lot Like Christmas are set in near future or altered present situations. There’s a story that feels contemporary, except that we’re dealing with aliens. Another feels like it’s in a not-too-distant future, but something went quite wrong in the interim and the characters deal with that difference. In other words, the Christmasy part is quite recognizable, it’s just some of the characters and circumstances are a bit odd.

Thoughts: Connie Willis is an American writer, but she is most well-known for the Oxford Time Travel Series, which I loved: Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and the mammoth WWII story in two volumes, Blackout and All Clear.

Only a couple of the stories in A Lot Like Christmas are set in the UK. “Cat’s Paw” features a detective and his sidekick, very reminiscent of Holmes and Watson. This story felt very much in the spirit of telling creepy stories at Christmas (a tradition explored in this article for the Smithsonian). The other British story features both A Christmas Carol and A Little Princess. Most of the action takes place in a London department store called Harridges, which made me laugh.

Many of the stories invoked nostalgia for me. There was a story about Christmas newsletters (a tradition that I picked up from my mother but then abandoned after she died because I realized that she was my primary audience). There were at least two stories featuring choirs — choral singing was a huge part of my childhood holiday seasons. Several stories were about churches and church people during the holiday season with all the stresses and paradoxes that I remember when I was young. Another story played on the nostalgia for Christmas movies.

Appeal: Short stories can be handy in the busy holiday season. If you like your Christmas to include lots of the traditions alongside something a little different, the stories in A Lot Like Christmas may charm you as they did me. It took me about three weeks to read them all, but I loved having these stories as the accompaniment for the bulk of the season.

Challenge: A Lot Like Christmas was one of the four books that I intended to read for the 12 Books of Christmas Challenge hosted by Just Another Girl and her Books. Let’s take a look at the others….

• Last Christmas in Paris by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb. I’m still waiting on this one to become available at the library.
• Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop by Jenny Colgan. I DNF’d this one after a few pages because I wasn’t feeling it.
• Make My Wish Come True by Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick. I’m first in line at the library for this one, so I’m still hoping to get to read it.