A review by kori_krc
All I Want from Santa by Lisa Jackson, Lisa Jackson

1.0

*Tyra Banks voice* If I could give this a 0/5 I would, but since that is not possible, I give this a 1. I had many issues with this book. Based off of the synopsis, I was expecting a kind of gooey, Hallmark-esk book to read over Christmas. However it kind of felt like an unedited, rushed mess. The relationship between Victoria and Travis was so rushed it felt like whiplash. One minute, Victoria was still pining over her dead husband from 4 years ago, and then in the span of 2-3 weeks (to be honest, the timeline wasn't very clear but I am assuming that this all happened in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas) married to some random man she just met. Travis is uncomfortably pushy towards her, regardless of the fact that HE JUST MET HER, and his son CLEARLY is having a really hard time adapting to moving to a state he knows no one, in a house that's really run down and needs fixing, and that his mother really only wants him when it's convenient. Travis basically pushed Victoria into marrying him when they haven't even dated or started a relationship, which was weird, and wouldn't take no for an answer, despite how often she would express that she wasn't ready for another relationship/husband yet. It also bothered me that after she said yes to marrying him and even after they rushed off to get married the literal next day - she kept saying "love with surely come later" as if she KNEW they weren't in love because they had really only kissed a couple of times and had sex once in the 3 weeks of knowing each other. Travis also kept putting a lot of mysoginistic tones onto their relationship; saying that he wanted a woman who would raise his kids, clean his house, and take care of him, when he knew that Victoria was a strong, independent woman who wanted an equal partnership (which she let all his comments go as if they were jokes when they didn't have a sarcastic/jokey tone to them at all and he kept saying it to her as if he was trying to drill it into her head that if she wanted him, that was how she was to behave). All of this adding to the fact that Travis' son, Bryan, was CLEARLY not okay with anything that was going on and wasn't even included in the decision for his father to start dating someone, let alone get married and have her along with her 4 year old daughter move in with them in a matter of weeks of knowing them. I spent this entire time cringing at how fast everything was going between these two and screaming that they needed to pay more attention to Bryan. Speaking of the children, Amy, who was 4, had characteristics of a 8-10 year old. This book could have really benefitted from some editing and updating. Not only because of the copious amount of grammatical errors I kept running into, but also from the fact that things kept being repeated, but in different formats, there was no character development, the pacing was SEVERELY off, and there were tons of scenes that just felt unnatural and uncomfortable. It was really had to believe that these two main characters could ever possibly be together with their lack of chemistry and it was really hard to believe that Victoria's character was so consumed by the loss of her husband, Hank, and then all of the sudden she just wasn't anymore? All in all, it was not the fun, lighthearted, Christmas book that I thought it was going to be. It wasn't even a whirlwind romance that I couldn't help but root for. Lisa Jackson being one of my favorite author's really missed the mark for me on this one. I know this was a reprint of the story she had written (in the 80s?), but I really feel like if she was going to rebrand this, this year, she should have reworked it and had it reedited so that it would have made sense and wasn't so awful. She has grown so much since this story was written and the fact that she didn't put an ounce of thought into a rework with her current skillset just tells me that this was a cash grab for the holidays.