Christmas at the Chalet

Available: October 16, 2018

Thank you to NetGalley.com and to St. Martin's Press for the eARC in exchange for my opinion.

I am Charlie Brown and Anita Hughes is Lucy. Every time she grabs a new football (otherwise known as her latest release) I am all over it - hoping for an amazing book that I don't feel the need to hyper-critique. And every time, I land flat on my back with a laundry list of complaints..

Anita Hughes is a great author but I think she feels the need to fill the shoes of Danielle Steel with her grandiose novels of exceptionally talented and beautiful women who have the crappiest love lives out there and yet can find love again in some exotic and expensive locale. To quote Monty Python, "I'm not dead yet".

So here are my beefs with this one (in no particular order):

- Who lets the models ski/sled/toboggan run before a fashion show? - How dumb are you to ski on an injured ankle? - If you're so worried about being seen with someone, stop going in public with them - What fashion model eats fondue? Or basically eats as much as Nell the week of an important fashion show? Or drinks all of that liquor? - To Nell - screw your family if they can't get over themselves to put you above their feelings on what should be one of the most important and amazing days of your life. And wtf about Eliot's family? - What fricking year was Patty born? By my calculations she seems to may be just a few years older than me but its like she was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s with her beef that she was not allowed to do the things she wanted or be a female at her father's studio. Did she never hear of Sherry Lansing who came to be the head of a major motion picture studio in 1980? Did she just miss the first feminist movement of the late '70s and '80s? What privleged rock did she live under?

Yet with all of these beefs I still flock to a new Anita Hughes book like a moth to a bright shiny light because its still a cute fluffy read.