Review: Let It Snow Anthology

Let it Snow by John Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm giving this one 3 stars....and that's a gift.

I don't read anthologies often, but I do like them. It's a good opportunity to find new authors and I've found some brilliant ones in the past. Unfortunately, in this case, the only think I'm sure of after reading these three stories is that I'll probably not read any of their other books. They weren't bad, per se, they just weren't to my taste, writing wise.

Or maybe some day I'll relent and try again in case it was just these characters and not the writers.

When I finished the first story, I was kind of pissed because there was a pretty big question left unanswered. That was until I started the second one and realized the authors were each writing a couple in this town on this snowy Christmas Eve/Christmas Day until they all converged in a Starbucks the day after Christmas and had their Ah ha! moments of unknowingly intersecting with each others lives for 3 days.

In the first story, Jubilee meets Jeb on the train and he's frantic about something...something he's still frantic about when he runs into Tobin in the second story....that something being Addie, the girl we meet in the third story. And so on.

The one story I did like was Tobin and the Duke, and it's probably the reason this has 3 stars and not 2. Tobin was deliciously boy-clueless and watching him come to terms with unthinking things, and middle happy, and poor Angie wanting to kiss him and/or knee the clueless out of him was a delight to read.

Jubilee and Stuart - dude, I have no idea what I was reading even as I read it. Was Jubilee ubersmart? Or just a bubblehead who didn't track well. I saw no signs of the former and many of the latter. And seriously, what was up with the mother and "you're one of us now." I kept expecting her to be locked in the basement or sent up to the mother ship or something.

Then there's Addie. Self-centered Addie who has some remarkable epiphany? I don't buy it. Maybe I would have if her moment of showing that she'd changed wasn't filled with "hey, you're that Addie?" and "omg is that a pig??" sprinkled into it. And Mayzie...seriously, what was with the strange bit of angel stuff thrown in there out of absolute nowhere??

It felt to me that they had a great opportunity for deus ex machina with Mayzie, or probably moreso with the Tinfoil Guy (don't ask) but even though he was *in* every story, he didn't seem to have any sort of impact on the couples. I don't know if that would have helped, but even then, I'm not sure.