My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories: A Book Review

This book was so much fun to read during this holiday season!  I received this book for my birthday in November, and I usually like to choose 1 or 2 Christmas books to read over the season; since I just received this one, I thought it would be perfect for this year!

Title: My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Author: Stephanie Perkins

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Publication Date: October 1, 2014

Pages: 320

Out in Paperback?: No

Goodreads

Amazon

My Rating: 3.5/5

Review:

Goodreads Summary:

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.

Characters:

Since there are 12 different short stories, it is going to be difficult to talk about all of the characters.  In order to make this post a decent length, I think I will discuss my favorite stories.  Overall, I thought this book was really cute; it was fun to read a few short stories every day during the holiday season.  I definitely enjoyed some more than others, and I think this is just based on my personal preference because some stories ventured into other genres of which I am not a huge fan.  Out of the 12 stories, I have 3 that I loved; I loved the characters and the plot, and I thought they were very unique.  The first being Rainbow Rowell’s story.  I absolutely LOVED these characters; Mags and Noel are our main characters, and they are ridiculously cute.  I also loved the story Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus by Myra McEntire, with good girl Gracie and troublemaker Vaughn.  And lastly, I really enjoyed Laini Taylor’s story about Neve, a sweet and curious girl who follows her heart.

Plot:

In Midnights by Rainbow Rowell, Mags and Noel are best friends who have known each other for several years.  The story tells of the New Year’s Eves of the past and how the two would spend them together at parties.  However, Noel is more of an outgoing personality, who loves to dance, and Mags prefers to sit aside at these New Year’s Eve parties.  As the two begin to drift apart due to college, they reunite at another New Year’s Eve party, and it is the cutest thing ever!  I absolutely LOVED this story, and it was the best way to begin this book.  The plot and the characters were absolutely adorable, and I would definitely read this again!  The next story that I really enjoyed was Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus by Myra McEntire.  This was your classic contemporary, bad boy meets good girl story, but I really liked it.  I thought the characters, Gracie and Vaughn, were cute, and the story was just a feel-good story all around.  The last story that really captured my attention was the last story of the book by Laini Taylor, The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer.  Now I would definitely classify this short story as fantasy, which I don’t have much experience with, but I want to dive into this genre more.  Neve was the main character of this story, and the details of this world were incredible.  Obviously, the world building focused on their Christmas traditions of a future husband leaving a gift for his future wife every day in December; rejection of this marriage proposal came in the form of a dead flower outside of their door.  I just thought this was such a unique story that I was intrigued from the beginning!

Writing Style:

Out of the 12 short stories, I have my favorites that I have mentioned.  And it is funny because each of those stories was from an author that I have never read before!  Rainbow Rowell has received a lot of hype recently with her books, and now after reading this short story, I definitely can’t wait to pick up another book by her!  I loved her short story because the writing was amazing!  The character’s dialogue was cute and funny, and I wanted more!  Myra McEntire is an author I haven’t heard of before, and although her story wasn’t very unique, it was still cute and well written.  I also haven’t read anything by Laini Taylor, but now I think I need too!  Her short story had me hanging on every word to find out how it was going to end, especially with her incredible world building!

Have you read this book?  What were your favorite short stories?

FTC Disclaimer:

All items mentioned were purchased by me.  This is not a sponsored post.  All opinions are my own.  No affiliate links were used.