Alaskan Holiday by Debbie Macomber

Read No
Length 256
Quick Review Alaskan Holiday is a really good example of what I don’t like in a book. Sappy romance, a pretend strong female character, bad grammar, terrible plot, and over all not put together well. Upside: there is a dog.

Happy first day of December!!! I’m starting off my holiday reading with a real low point. It’s not the worst book I’ve read all year, but it’s in the top three! Which means, in all hopefulness, that the reading quality can only go up the rest of the month!

I pretty much began reading Alaskan Holiday by Debbie Macomber feeling that it would be awful. It was. It was not good. It’s like a Hallmark movie in book form so a more painful time commitment.

The two main characters are Josie and Palmer. They’re in the middle of nowhere Alaska. A place so remote almost everyone leaves during the winter months and is only reachable by plane. Josie was the chef during the season, and Palmer lives there permanently. Palmer falls in love and asks her to marry him. The rest of the novel unfolds to the exact ending you know is going to happen.

Alaskan Holiday is incredibly sexist. There is the effort of having a strong, career oriented woman as the lead, but the whole novel falls into the trope of ‘need to calm this wild, career woman down to get her to settle into a small boring life.’ The woman gives up everything for the man. This is bolstered by the fact that there are several other women trying to convince Josie she can be happy in the middle of nowhere because love. Palmer is awful. I really hated his character. He oozes the quiet, toxic masculinity that is a total turn-off to any actual strong, career oriented woman I’ve ever met. His machismo was irritating after page 2. His jealousy is beyond aggravating. I couldn’t take it.

There is a lot of telling and very little showing, so the storytelling is Alaskan Holiday is as bad as the characters. The story spends 130 pages, out of 220, setting up a story that could have been easily summed up in 25 pages. The story reads like a teenager’s diary, but not an insightful, wise teenager. There are also a lot of grammar errors.

I was really unimpressed by Alaskan Holiday. It was pretty much a waist of my time. Luckily it was so bad and easy to read, I was able to read it in a less time than a Hallmark movie takes.

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Memorable Quotes
“I’m a man who needs to work with his hands, not just his brain.”

Title: Alaskan Holiday
Author: Debbie Macomber
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Copyright 2018
ISBN: 9780399181283