How Sweet is Too Sweet? A Review of Choir of Angels by Debbie Macomber

Title: Choir of Angels
Author: Debbie Macomber
Published: September 30, 2014
This book was received from Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

I've been on a Christmas story binge.  I love how sweet all the stories are and they all have such happy endings.  But this one put a bit too much sugar in the mix for me and now I have a metaphorical toothache.  Perhaps is was the fact that there are three stories about the same three angels and it was just a little too much.  Or perhaps it was that the sweet endings were so contrived they seemed a bit forced?  But not all is bad between this cover.  There were some very nice high points (mostly the second story).

I chose this book because the name of the angels made me giggle inside.  Who can resist a the trouble making trio names Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy.  I'll hit the first and third story first as they had similar things I didn't like.  Both were very quick and had a lot of things going on in them.  Lots of characters, lots to fix, and lots seeming to go wrong.  I kept losing track of who was doing what and even who belonged to which family.  It was crazy!  They were both novella length and really needed to be about 50 pages longer to make them work.  The third book wasn't even one complete story, but three short stories that were told alternating through the chapters.  It was very confusing.

Now the second book was to die for.  I loved it, and would have loved to have read it on its own without it being sandwiched between the others.  Now I may be a little biased since it was the true romance of the bunch, but it just had a lot more going for it than the other two.  First, it was novel length.  I got to know my characters, their family, and really see how the trio of angels interacted.  I loved all of them.  The story was just the right about of sugary sweetness that I would expect in a Christmas romance, but there were still a few surprises and at one point it even seemed to fall apart.

If you want a feel-good holiday spirit romance, I would recommend giving story two, Those Christmas Angels, a shot.  It is sold by itself and was the best of the bunch.