{"id":157,"date":"2011-11-07T05:12:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T05:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/the-christmas-shoppe-by-melody-carlson.html"},"modified":"2011-11-07T05:12:00","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T05:12:00","slug":"christmas-shoppe-by-melody-carlson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/christmas-shoppe-by-melody-carlson\/","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Shoppe By Melody Carlson"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-AIPeRPthRLs\/TpzhFjLDSCI\/AAAAAAAAEtw\/VN1CRzRO_gg\/s1600\/christmas.jpg\" style=\"margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"280\" width=\"181\" src=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-AIPeRPthRLs\/TpzhFjLDSCI\/AAAAAAAAEtw\/VN1CRzRO_gg\/s400\/christmas.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.barnesandnoble.com\/w\/christmas-shoppe-melody-carlson\/1102186949\">The Christmas Shoppe<\/a> by Melody Carlson<\/p>\n<p>When Matilda Honeycutt moves to town, she purchases an old building that was up for sale. One a townsman (one of the town&#8217;s politicians) catches wind of the sale, he&#8217;s mortified. He&#8217;d wanted to purchase the building for his own gain. <\/p>\n<p>However, Matilda has other plans. She wants to open a Christmas shop. The town&#8217;s people believe that her shop will have Christmas lights, ornaments, etc. for sale, however, they&#8217;re in for a big surprise when they actually open the doors to this new establishment.<\/p>\n<p>Is Matilda a witch, a sorcerer, or just somebody who seems to know all the townspeople&#8217;s needs. People come into her shop out of curiosity, but leave with changed\/upbeat personalities. <\/p>\n<p>I found this book a little hard to get into. I didn&#8217;t really start to enjoy this novella until about halfway through the book. I thought the beginning was kind of slow and I initially had a hard time connecting with some of the characters.<\/p>\n<p>However, the connection finally happened, and, overall, this is a joyous story. There&#8217;s also a romance thread within this novel. The town manager finds herself smitten with the town&#8217;s newspaper owner. Both of these people have inner conflicts to resolve before they&#8217;re free to fall in love again.<\/p>\n<p>This is a nice, short, joyous read to enjoy over the holidays!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\">~Cecelia Dowdy~<\/a><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Christmas Shoppe by Melody Carlson When Matilda Honeycutt moves to town, she purchases an old building that was up for sale. One a townsman (one of the town&#8217;s politicians) catches wind of the sale, he&#8217;s mortified. He&#8217;d wanted to purchase the building for his own gain. However, Matilda has other plans. She wants to [&hellip;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bakerrevell","category-book-talk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paovYP-2x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ceceliadowdy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}