Book Review - Christmas in Evergreen: Bells Are Ringing
I received this galley in exchange for an honest review.
Author: Lacey Baker
Genre: Romance
Series: Christmas in Evergreen #4
Publisher: Hallmark Publishing
Publish Date: November 2, 2021
Format: eBook
★★★★☆
This book is perfect for those that like: Stories About Finding Yourself, Small Towns Coming Together, and Choosing Love.
You might not like this book if you aren’t into: Christmas, Snow Storms Ruining Things, or a Touch of Magic Santa.
Favorite Line: “This whole town’s over the top. It’s like being trapped in a Christmas snow globe.” - Sonya
Purchase: Bookshop / Barnes & Noble / Amazon
Summary:
Welcome back to Evergreen,
the town built on Christmas wishes…
And learn what happens
after one snow-globe wish comes true.
Life is going great for Hannah, really. She’s fallen in love with her best friend, her brother is getting married, and she’s looking forward to another festive Christmas in Evergreen. Still, between her job, taking charge of the choir, and being the town’s jill-of-all-trades, she’s feeling uninspired…especially when Elliot starts to question his own role in the town.
Hannah finds fresh inspiration in the brand-new Evergreen Christmas Museum, and she volunteers for their storytelling project. When she interviews her fellow Evergreenians, however, she learns that not everyone wants the museum around; specifically Mr. Cooper who owns a third of the building. As Hannah finds herself with more and more responsibilities, and as her relationships with Elliot and her family grow strained, she starts to wonder about what she really wants. Can her love and newly-found purpose survive the changes that loom after the holidays are over?
Y’all, I’ve been obsessed with Hannah since the original Christmas in Evergreen movie and I’ve been dying for both a movie and book focused on her and her story. From the very beginning of this entire series, we get to know Hannah as the always cheerful, selfless person ready to help anyone in her hometown of Evergreen, Vermont. In Christmas in Evergreen: Bells are Ringing, written by Lacey Baker, and based on the Hallmark original movie of the same name, we FINALLY get Hannah’s story.
Part of what I love about novelizations is giving us, the reader, a chance to get a deeper look into the characters we’ve already fallen in love with on the screen. Lacey does just that in this fourth installment of the Evergreen series by letting us in the minds of both Hannah, and Elliot, her childhood friend turned boyfriend. Both are struggling to find their place in the world and in turn, their place with one another. Hannah with her efforts to honor her late parents by filling her days with one project after another leaves little time to focus on Elliot, and Elliott with his big dreams that would take him out of Evergreen and away from Hannah. They know that they love each other deeply, but are also aware that they want very different things for their respective futures. By giving us both of their POVs, we find out so much more about their motivations and what leads them to make their choices. Of course, being inside their heads also made me want to throw them both into a room to just WORK IT OUT ALREADY, but Romance! Lol.
And no visit to Evergreen would be complete without Michelle, her fiance Thomas (and Hannah’s brother), his son David, and the rest of the town’s people. Every year I look forward to being with these characters again because they are a community full of love and joy. Even when things look bleak, they come together as a chosen family and work together to make sure everyone is taken care of. It’s this Spirit of the Season that keeps these movies a fan favorite and Lacey has captured that same Spirit in book form giving us a perfect companion to these movies we love. That being said, while you technically could read this as a stand-alone, I would recommend reading the others in the series to get the full history of this town and its people.
Thank you to Xpresso Tours for letting us be a part of this book tour. If you’d like to check out the other stops on the tour AND enter to win a $20 Amazon gift card, check out our Blog Tour Announcement.