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Title: Angel Christmas (Five Heavenly Romances): Catch a Falling Angel/Brush of Angel Wings/The Trouble With Angelina/Tin Angel/Guarded by Angels
ISBN: 0451406281
Author:
Mary Balogh
Marilyn Campbell
Carole Nelson Douglas
Emma Merritt
Patricia Rice
Publicate Date: 1995-11-01
Publish: 1995-11-01
List Price: $5.50
Average Customer Rating: 3.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $12.21
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.01
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1: two good stories out of five
The anthology has 5 stories, set in different time periods. The connecting factor is that they all have angels in them.
****?? "Catch a Falling Angel" by Carole Nelson Douglas. Time travel romance.
Since this story is the reason I bought the book, it's only fitting that it's my favorite. Adrian Ashworth, a Regency rake, is driving his phaeton with more recklessness than usual, crashes, and ends up in an exclusive club that turns out to be the anteroom to hell. There he's told that he's not quite bad enough to join in what appears to be non-stop gaming and wenching, but he can go back to earth, and if he can redeem, or rather un-redeem himself by Christmas, he'll be admitted. Otherwise, it'll be limbo, because he's certainly not good enough for heaven. He has 4 days.
When he arrives back on earth, it's in the middle of a rock concert, and he's the star. This is one of those times when I'm glad I didn't read the back cover, because it was such a fun surprise. When he's asked via the Wishful Wings of Christmas Foundation to meet Natalie Parks, a young woman recently recovered from a car accident after years in the hospital, he sees her as his ticket back to hell.
It was great fun watching him adjust to 20th century life, and to try to reconcile his plan to be evil with his growing affection for Natalie.
** "Brush of Angel Wings" by Emma Merritt. Contemporary paranormal romance.
Vince returns to his great-grandmother's home for Christmas, where he's hoping to reunite with his first love and his cousin James's widow, Hannah. James and Hannah's daughter Allie, meanwhile, has wished for a new father.
It's a pretty standard Christmas story plot, with the addition of an antique wooden cowboy angel with a family legend attached. But even though it's only novella-length, it moves slowly. The backstory is doled out in big expository chunks, and the same information gets repeated several times, though oddly, it takes until near the end of the story to find out why both of them insist that Vince is responsible for James's death.
Then there are Vince and Hannah. They both went back and forth between wanting to get back together and loathing each other switching roles without warning or motivation, until I really didn't care what they did.
And then there was the ending, which was a ****spoiler****tacked-on excuse to force both Hannah and Vince to overcome their fear of motorcycles.****
**?? "The Trouble with Angelina" by Marilyn Campbell. Contemporary paranormal romance.
Angel Chadick is a widowed mom; Sean O'Grady is owner of a construction company and the mayor of their small town. They're both busily trying to fill their loneliness with overwork. Sean's grandfather Seamus is the angel trying to get them together.
This could have been a cute story--Seamus is mischievous and plays several pranks to force the two together, but that only works if you like the characters being set up.
Angel is described as being accident-prone, but that's never really followed up on, other than to result in her having a big purple bump on her forehead during their first date. And she has 3 children: an older son and twins. I know I've said what I think about kids in romances, and this is no exception. The twins are basically nonentities, making me wonder why they took up space in the novella. The older son is adamantly opposed to his mother dating (gee, what an unusual idea!), but does an abrupt 180 after angel Seamus tells him Sean likes to go fishing and camping. Uh, yeah, I'll believe that.
The biggest obstacle to enjoying this story, though, is that I didn't like the main characters. Angel flies off the handle and tells Sean off, thinks he's doing a horrible job as mayor; Sean yells at her that she doesn't know what she's talking about and criticizes her for complaining about the government without getting involved. But hey, they're both hot and single, so who cares if they dislike each other? Bah.
**** "Tin Angel" by Patricia Rice. Historical paranormal romance.
Thank goodness I didn't stop after the first story, though I questioned my sanity in not doing so several times during the preceding two stories. Patricia Rice is a favorite, and I hadn't even realized she had a story in this anthology.
Jeffrey, Viscount Darcourt, is despondent. Nowadays, we'd say he was burned out. He doesn't see the value in anything he does. Then an angel is sent to restore his spirit. I think. I'm a little fuzzy on the mechanism here, but she has something to do with a tin angel Christmas tree ornament. (Disclaimer: school started this week, and with it, 5:30 mornings--the story itself might be perfectly clear and I'm the one who's fuzzy.) He decides to call the angel "Mary."
The story is sweet, as Mary sets about trying to shake Jeffrey out of his doldrums, and funny, as her efforts don't always turn out for the best, or the way she planned.
And in another case of it being better to avoid the back cover, I couldn't figure out until almost the end who the heroine was. Mary, the obvious choice, was invisible to all but Jeffrey. I didn't think Patricia Rice would leave them like the couple in "Paradise Bossed". Then there was his brother's widow, and she was rather boring, not to mention the whole idea was kind of squicky. And I really didn't want him falling for the vamp his mother brought to the house for Christmas in a matchmaking attempt. The only other candidate was the vicar's daughter, who was abed with a fever and was dying because she'd lost the will to live after her fianc?? died.
Suffice it to say, it was resolved satisfactorily.
*** "Guarded by Angels" by Mary Balogh. Historical paranormal romance.
This one's a reunion story. June and Elliott have been married for 5 years. They haven't seen each other for 4.75 years. On alternating years, they go to Elliott's family's home for Christmas, but this year, his grandmother has decided enough is enough and has invited them both, telling each the other would be elsewhere.
On the way there, however, each of them is waylaid by a snowstorm. June is rescued by an older woman named Mary; Elliott by a young boy named Joss; both are taken to the same small cottage, where the snow forces them to spend the night.
The woman and her grandson's love and good cheer is contagious, and soon the couple are relaxing and rekindling their love.
My main complaint with the story is that it's not explained until near the end why June and Elliott separated, and their reconciliation left me... hehe... cold.
The best part, though, was the fairly subtle portrayal of Joss--the angel who really enjoyed taking the form of a young boy.
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2: Worth it for Mary Balogh's story
From the back cover:
CATCH A FALLING ANGEL by Carole Nelson Douglas
To prove he's bad enough for hell, a devilish rogue becomes a rock star out to ruin an innocent young girl--unless he gets foiled by some Yuletide magic.
BRUSH OF ANGEL WINGS by Emma Merritt
A little girl prays to her special angel for a daddy, and a Texas Ranger returns to his hometown for the holidays in hopes of rekindling the passion he once shared with her mother--his first love.
THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELINA by Marilyn Campbell
It takes a little angel mischief to unite a handsome young major and a fiery widow by Christmas.
TIN ANGEL by Patricia Rice
A goodhearted, though skeptical, hero learns the joy of Christmas when he falls in love with an angel sent to make him believe in miracles.
GUARDED BY ANGELS by Mary Balogh
When a mysterious old lady and her young grandson offer their cottage to an estranged couple who got lost during a blizzard, it's a gift that will last a lifetime.
And my review:
The anthology is linked by the common theme of falling in love at Christams time, with a little help from angels. Apart from that, the stories are vastly different. Some are historical, some are contemporary. Some involve the angel falling in love; in other stories, the angels are merely helpers to bring others together. Since the back cover descriptions are very brief, I'll also include a basic plot synposis along with my own personal thoughts.
CATCH A FALLING ANGEL is a story a bit on the darker side. It spans both historical and contemporary time periods. The hero (from historical times) has died and is unworthy of heaven, but is also not evil enough to get into hell. To gain acceptance into hell (heaven is out of the question by this point), the hero is sent back to earth (into modern times) with a chance to (un)redeem himself by ruining a virgin. However, he ends up falling in love with the woman he is supposed to ruin.
I didn't really like the darker aspect of this story, and some parts of it didn't flow well. It was to the point when I ended up having to reread several pages to make sense of what was going on. That shouldn't happen. I managed to finish this novella, but it isn't one I'd bother to read again. Three stars.
BRUSH OF ANGEL WINGS is a contemporary that had a lot going for it. I love reconcilliation stories. In this one, the couple broke up when she wanted him to make a commitment to her. He wanted to chase his dream of being in the rodeo. By the time he realized that she was worth more to him, she'd gotten engaged to his cousin. Now she is a widow, and her daughter wants a new daddy for Christmas, and the hero wants the only woman he's ever loved back.
Unfortunately, this one needed better editing. The writing did not flow well. The point of view was all over the place. I had a hard time sorting out which thoughts belonged to which character. I think there was a good story in there trying to get out, but the writing made it very difficult to read or get drawn into. Two stars.
THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELINA is a contemporary with a dash of comedy. It is an offbeat story about a deceased grandfather, who is now a guardian angel, trying to secure a wife for his grandson. Hi-jinks ensue as this angel uses unorthodox methods (including sending a forklift tire flying across several lanes of traffic to crush the heroine's bike) to throw the two prospective lovebirds together.
This was another good story that was marred by the writing style. Again, it didn't flow well, and I often had to reread sections to make sense of them. Also, there was so much dialogue without prose that sometimes I had a hard time figuring out who was talking. I had to go back and count the lines of type to sort it all out. Also, there were a lot of basic grammar mistakes, and that's something that really gets under my skin. For instance, two women are in the same scene, yet the writer uses "her" without making it clear which woman is being referred to. Maybe I should blame the editor for not catching that one, but even so, this was not a story I could get into. Two stars.
TIN ANGEL by Patricia Rice is a historical. This is a story of an angel falling in love with a human. A plot that's been done before, but one that remains very popular.
Again, I didn't like the writing style with this one. There were a lot of big sections of history that read like a textbook. I read romance for the relationship, not for a history lesson. That's what textbooks are for. This story also suffered from an inbalance between prose and dialogue, but this time, the problem was too much prose. There were big sections without any dialogue, and the story was slow going. Not that I have a problem with prose, but it needs to move the story along. Unfortunately, here is just dragged. I was unable to get drawn into the story and unable to force myself to finish it. Two stars.
GUARDED BY ANGELS by Mary Balogh is another historical, and the best story in the book. In it, an estranged husband and wife end up stranded in a snowstorm. They are taken in by a woman and her grandson, and learn to resolve their differences and fall in love again.
I never know what to expect with Mary Balogh. I have adored some of her stories and hated others. But this one was a winner. The paranormal aspect of it was beautifully done. It was never too heavy-handed, yet you really felt the presence of the angels. The issues that had estranged the husband and wife were way more than just silly misunderstandings. They were real issues, and were resolved well, not just rushed through. It's difficult to deal with real relationship obstacles in a full-length novel, let alone in less than 80 pages, yet Mary Balogh manages it, and does so beautifully. I can see why she is called a master of the genre.
I loved the characters, and was really rooting for them. Again, I was amazed that the author could create such well-rounded characters in so little space, but she did. They had just enough flaws to make them real people, yet they weren't so overly flawed as to make them unlikeable. That's a difficult balance to achieve, but this author does so with ease.
I can't say enough good about GUARDED BY ANGELS. I loved it! This is a story I will be keeping to read over and over again. Five stars!
While most of the stories were not very absorbing or memorable, Mary Balogh's more than makes up for it. Recommended for her story alone.
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3: above average-read for Balogh's story....
This Angel Romance Anthology was interesting-I would have given it more stars if they would have stuck to one genre or time period in which to have the angels stories.
1-Carole Nelson Douglas-known more now for her fiction and mysteries than romance-her romance was original and well written-a amalgamation of Angel, Time Travel and Regency and Modern day-I found this story easy to read and enjoyable.
2-Emma Merritt-this story is set in modern day American west-I tried to read a bit but frankly I'm not a fan of Western Romance so I skipped it as it seemed a bit to formulaic and "series romance" for my tastes. Others may enjoy it though.
3-Marilyn Campbell-I was hopeful to see a story by this author-as she's written several paranormal or futuristic romances-sadly this was also set in modern day American and reads like a "Harlequin".
4-Patricia Rice-this story set in the 1850's was just too dark for my tastes. The hero talks about suicide and is very depressed.
5-Mary Balogh-I've hardly ever read anything not enjoyable of Miss Balogh's and this is no exception. "Guarded by Angels" is another heartwarming short story of forgiveness and redemption set in Regency England. Balogh's seems to have written several short stories like this of a married, but estranged couple who though family, and in this case, Angels, are brought together to try to save their marriage. This one was a bit of a tearjerker-and if you are like me and love the "wounded war hero/soldier" storyline then I think you'll enjoy this one. Very sensual but in a mature and beautiful way as well.
So, all in all-two exceptional, and three average or a bit below average. I would recommend this book for Baloghs fans specifically-others may want to skip it.
3 stars
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