My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Winter Romances by Stephanie Perkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yep, it’s safe to say that I’m very, very behind on my Christmas reading. It’s the middle of January and I’m only now getting round to finishing and posting my review of this book.

My True Love Gave to Me is a collection of twelve short stories by YA authors all themed around the holiday period. It’s quite difficult to rate this collection as it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Some stories I absolutely loved, some were ok and some I just wasn’t too keen on.

I have to admit before I start that I’m generally not a fan of short stories. They’re never quite long enough (I know they aren’t supposed to be) to really draw you in and let you connect with the characters. When they do draw you in, the ending always comes too soon. I want more.

Despite my general dislike of short stories I couldn’t resist this book as it included stories from two of my favourite authors, Rainbow Rowell (Fangirl, Carry On) and Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss) and I have to admit I love Christmassy themed stories.

For the most part this collection didn’t disappoint. I won’t go through story by story but I will say that Stephanie Perkins and Rainbow Rowell did not let me down. Their stories, It’s a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown and Midnights were most definitely the highlights for me. They had very likeable characters and managed to suck me into the story and the emotion from the start. While I would like more (please) the length actually worked.

As well as discovering unsurprisingly that my favourite authors are fabulous I have to say that I was also impressed with some of the other stories. I particularly enjoyed Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus by Myra McEntyre as it made me laugh quite a lot and What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? by Gayle Forman. I’ve never read anything by these authors but I’ll definitely be looking out for them.

The remainder were more of the ok level rather than anything particularly special. I felt that in certain stories things were a little bit too complicated and convoluted for a short story which put me off. Slightly worryingly there are also a couple I don’t remember (Jenny Han and Ally Carter) so I guess they weren’t great or terrible.

Regardless, it’s definitely given me a taste of a lot of new authors and my TBR list has grown exponentially.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a review copy and apologies for taking so long to post the thing.