Both of these were ebooks from my extensive Christmas ebook collection, the first of which was Christmas Entertainments by Alice Maude Kellogg. This is a collection of poetry and prose for school plays written by in 1897.
Before I even get to reviewing the contents of the book, I have a bit of a bone to pick with the formatting of this ebook. The poems ended up with a scroll arrow right at the bottom of the page, which I've never seen before. It was in exactly the right place to mean when you hit it you frequently brought up the progress bar instead of scrolling down to the next stanza of the poem.
On a couple of occasions I wasn't paying attention, hit the scroll arrow, brought up the progress bar and then tapped again so jumped forward in the book and had to try and backtrack to where I'd been moments before.
I don't know if this was just my old Kindle being, well, old, or if this is something screwy in the way this ebook was set up. I've never seen it before and there didn't seem to be any way to turn it off. Perhaps at some point I'll try downloading it onto my new Kindle to see if this still has the scroll button, but I'm probably not that invested in this book to bother doing that.
This book was very dated which meant that it came across as kind of offensive. A lot of the little plays/rhymes for children to recite would need reworking to make them less racist or sexist. Plus a lot of them call for the songs to be sung to the tune of songs which aren't widely known any more.
It's a nice little snippet of history but I think it would be pretty redundant for what it was originally intended as.
Still in the mood for something festive, I followed this up with A Cowboy for Christmas by Kristen James.
When the brother she barely knew passes away, Missy inherits his share of the Stables he was running with Brent and decides that she won't let her lack of knowledge of horses put her off trying to make a go of it. Brent's not convinced she's got the staying power the business needs and, of course, sparks begin to fly.
This is a really short read, just 176 pages. I read it in a few sittings over the course of the day on the 27th of November. You pretty much know what to expect from a book like this and this book pretty much delivers.
It was fairly obvious that Missy and Brent were going to get together, you can kind of tell that from the title and the cover. It's kind of like when you watch a romantic comedy, it's not about the ending since you already know what will happen, it's about the route they take to get there.
I did like the writing style. It wasn't trying to be anything fancy but I enjoyed the descriptions of the scenery. There was also a sample of another book at the end which sounded pretty good as well.
A nice little read if you're looking for something vaguely festive and totally fluffy.
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Let me know what you think. :-)