Author: Holly Black

I received this book for free from St. Martin's Griffin in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

If you love holiday stories, holiday movies, made-for-TV-holiday specials, holiday episodes of your favorite sitcoms and, especially, if you love holiday anthologies, you’re going to fall in love with My True Love Gave To Me: Twelve Holiday Stories by twelve bestselling young adult writers, edited by international bestselling author Stephanie Perkins. Whether you enjoy celebrating Christmas or Hanukkah, Winter Solstice or New Year's there's something here for everyone. So curl up by the fireplace and get cozy. You have twelve reasons this season to stay indoors and fall in love.

I love the holidays, so when I was approached about reviewing this book I couldn’t pass it up. I also always love “feel good” stories and knew this would be filled with them. It didn’t disappoint. It has twelve different stories having to do with the holidays written by an amazing variety of authors. No matter what holiday you celebrate, this book will make you smile. Some even had me tearing up with happy tears. I always really have a hard time reviewing anthologies because I don’t want to have a review that is super long or too short, but I am going to try to do it as good as I can, but be assured, this is a book you want to read around the holidays or any time of year.

In this book we get stories about family, friends, romance, and just stuff that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Each story feels so full and lets you get to know the characters and their story enough so that you care what happens. It is always a pleasure when short stories can tell such a complete story that you are satisfied in such a small amount of words. I enjoyed each and every story in this book whether it was about getting a Christmas tree, getting that New Years Eve kiss, or making holiday magic through the joy of food. We even get a story about a sort of faerie, though it’s not really called that. Either way, we get a range of typical holiday stories and ones that include fantasy and magic. I don’t really want to get into each story and make this super long, but there is something for everyone in this book.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or other holidays, this story has a bit of everything. The best thing is since it’s short stories, you can read one quick story or read them all. When I am really enjoying a story, I don’t like to put it down until I finish. With this, I could finish a complete story rather quickly and not feel like I was missing something until I could get back to it. Not only is this book fabulous to read for yourself, it would also make a great gift for any of the readers in your life. So even though I haven’t gone much into the details of this book, it’s really great and I have a lot of love for it. Some of the stories I really loved, and some I just liked, but all together it was fantastic! Buy it for yourself or someone else. You won’t regret it.

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