The Christmas Town
By: Donna VanLiere
Rating: 5 of 5
This is a lovely story about a young woman searching for a place to call home after years of being moved around the foster care system. Lauren has not had the best of parents. Effectively abandoned, she moved from home to home in the foster system. While she ended up with a good family and didn’t suffer any form of abuse, she is still looking for a place and a family to call her own.
This Christmas, she decides to actively pursue finding a place to call home. Along the way, she ends up a witness in a hit and run accident. She becomes enmeshed with the people who live in the small town where the accident happened. She is especially taken with the messages that the young man who bags groceries puts in everyone’s bags. He is challenged due to a late diagnosis of an issue as an infant but has found his way in the world and is really a ray of sunshine.
The story takes a lot of twists and turns. It alternately made me laugh and it also brought tears to my eyes. It is an extremely touching story and one that I will be sharing this holiday season. I didn’t realize that it was part of a series but I will certainly be picking up the earlier works. It reads well as a stand-alone book but I so enjoyed it I want to read more.
I was provided a digital advance reader copy of this book by the publisher via Netgalley.