Great holiday read. Beautiful Christmas time romance. Love the setting and the characters.
Thanks St. Martains Press & NetGalley for the ARC.

A beautiful Christmas story that warmed by heart and soul as I was sipping hot tea curled up in a fuzzy blanket on the sofa w/ the fireplace on. Five stars!!!

Absolutely full of holiday charm, Christmas in Vermont by Anita Hughes is her latest holiday book to hit shelves. Grab a copy today, "magic of synchronicity and fate set at a quaint Vermont inn during the week after Christmas. "
Emma never stays in a relationship for more than a year and when a Christmas Eve occurrence has her finding a what she thought was a long gone item could it be a coincidence or is it as her best friend calls it, the magic of synchronicity .
The one that got away, of her past relationships there is one that stands out and rediscovering each other again in picturesque snowy Vermont well is it synchronicity or just coincidence?
When she discovers there is more to him than meets the eye is this second chance romance doomed before starts anew or will sparks fly along with the snowflakes in this beautifully charming romance set during the most festive time of the year?

Published October 15th 2019 by St. Martin's Griffin
I was given a complimentary copy of this book. Thank you.
All opinions expressed are my own.

A sweet, charming December story that you know is destined to have a happy ending.

Emma is 33 and hasn't had much luck in finding that perfect mate that she'd want to spend the rest of her life with. After a recent breakup with boyfriend Scott, she finds herself in a NYC pawn shop trying to sell the bracelet her last boyfriend had given to her. She notices a watch that looks very familiar to her and it's engraved. It turns out that it is the watch that Emma had given to Fletcher, the only man she really ever cared about. She hasn't seen him since after college when he left for a job in London and she stayed in back in the states.

When Emma's friend, Bronwyn, who believes in fate, intervenes, she comes up with a plan. She finds out through social media more about Fletcher's whereabouts. It seems that Emma will be spending time at a charming Vermont Inn over Christmas in the hopes that the two might reconnect.

A feel-good Christmas novel about second chances and lost connections.

I love the books that Anita Hughes writes. However, this one was not my favorite. I didn’t enjoy the story as much, I felt like the writing was a slightly different style than her normal, and I didn’t enjoy the characters all that much.

A sweet book for the end of your holiday tbr! Most stories feel similar nowadays but there was something cozy and comforting about this book.

A lovely trip from New York to Vermont with flashback memories of London and Maine. An old flame rekindled. I personally loved reading it because it took place in Vermont. I recognized when they went to Simon Pierce and The Vermont Teddy Bear Factory. They drove down route 100, my all-time favorite scenic route! It was fun to see how the author would fit some real Vermont into her story and I was so pleased that she truly did pull off the spirit of Vermont. Yay!

I love stories about chances, serendipity, synchronicity - call it what you will - the idea that two people are meant to be together and that fate will make it happen. It's naive, I know, but it's wonderful to imagine. Christmas in Vermont is all about second chances and fate.


When Emma goes into a pawn shop on Christmas Eve to sell the bracelet that her ex gave her, she discovers an engraved watch that she once gave to Fletcher, the "one who got away." Sentimentally, Emma purchases the watch for old time's sake. Her friend decides it is a sign that the two, Emma and Fletcher, are meant to be together and she arranges it so that the two of them are at the same place in Vermont at the same time. Of course there a moments of rekindled love, mishaps and miscommunication but in the end will their old feelings be enough to carry this couple into a future together? Well, you have to read Christmas in Vermont to find out! And you will want to read this gem this holiday season! Anita Hughes is a master story-teller in this genre and weaves a marvelous tale here. Definitely all the stars from me!

I really enjoyed this book, and enjoyed that it wasn’t sickeningly sweet with all the common Christmas themes. Of course it was still Christmassy, but not in a overly cloying way. I enjoy serendipity, or synchronicity stories in books that are supposed to feel good! I found it interesting that it took place starting on Christmas and counting down to New Years, I usually find that time being rushed through and I loved that they still considered it Christmas time. One last thing, this book has inspired me to want to go to Vermont and eat all the things and see all the sights!

I decided to read this book purely because it was set in a state I needed for my 5o states reading book challenge. Not only did I get my 49th state, I was rewarded with a pleasurable Christmas romance story which I seem to be addicted to reading during the holiday season. "Christmas in Vermont" begins with Emma visiting a pawn shop in New York in the hopes of selling a bracelet she received from a ex-boyfriend. Much to her surprise, she discovers a watch that she once gave her college sweetheart Fletcher for sale at the pawn shop. When Emma shows the watch to her best friend Bronwyn, her friend says it must be synchronicity. Without Emma's knowledge, Bronwyn, researches Emma's ex-flame and discovers that Fletcher is spending his Christmas holiday at a small Vermont inn. In the hopes of reuniting the long lost lovers, Bronwyn books Emma for a Christmas holiday in the same exact inn. Emma isn't sure she agrees with Bronwyn's plan but reluctantly agrees to go anyway. It doesn't take long for Emma to discover that seeing Fletcher again may be a little bit more complicated than she ever imagined and she wonders if second chances are even possible.

This kind of romance book appeals to me because I like how two people who once loved each other could later be reunited through synchronicity. I like the idea that a change in time or circumstances can allow things to work out differently for the couple the second time around. I enjoyed most parts of this book except I found some of the kid interactions a little unbelievable. I work with 8 or 9 years all year long and none of them sound like Lola (the 9 year old going on 20 year old fountain of wisdom and sophistication) I felt like she could have been toned down a bit. She also lacked proper adult supervision. (I have a child around the same age and would not be leaving him at the inn without first transferring him over to the adult in charge.) I was surprised at the amount of times where Lola was left alone without an adult supervising her.

Overall, Christmas in Vermont was a sweet romance and would love to see other books set in this Vermont town. Thanks to St. Martin's and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book. It was a fun stress relieving book to read during the holiday season. All thoughts expressed are my honest opinions of the book.

I received a Reviewer Copy of Christmas in Vermont by Anita Hughes from the publisher St. Martin's Press through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

What It’s About: Emma, an advertising executive in New York City, cannot make relationships work and always break up with her boyfriend right around the holidays, so when she finds a watch belonging to an ex-boyfriend, she can never forgets, her best friend convinces her its fate and she needs to travel to a small inn in Vermont to see if there can be a future with the ex, she never stopped loving. Unfortunately when he gets there he's with his daughter and new fiance.

What I Loved: I liked the character of Emma and I even was vaguely on board for the premise of light Christmas fluff, especially set in Vermont.

What I didn’t like so much: I live across the bridge from Vermont, so take that what you will, I have become fairly familiar with the landscape. The author doesn't really seemed to have researched much for the plot besides a quick google search and it doesn't really ring true to the beauty of Vermont, when she names places, she gets important details wrong, I'm willing to give a pass on this though because I'm not familiar with every setting that seems magical for Christmas and maybe just m one of few people who would notice. The other thing is that the headings and place changes aren't always correct. The book takes place the week between Christmas and literally has phrases 10 days till Christmas Day and changes which characters are talking part way through. Again, a reviewer copy I can forgive this because it's not a finally draft but it was definitely annoying. What I couldn't get over was how unlikable the main male character was, he was self-righteous and had weird interpretations of things and his actions were contradictory. There's also not really a ton of plot or romance, and you never really see why these two main characters should be in love because the main male character feels a bit mediocre. Additionally, several of the supporting characters are unlikable too, including the main characters best friends. The lack of chemistry between the two characters though I think is what dooms the book.

Who Should Read It: If you love Hallmark movies and don't need much conflict or humor or chemistry, give this a shot. I might also be the wrong viewing audience because of how close to home it is to me.

General Summary: Christmas in Vermont reads like a Hallmark movie you've seen too many times.

Christmas in Vermont by Anita Hughes is a warm, touching Christmas story. It makes you realize that life can change in a moment and love can be found again.

I liked the beginning of this book, but it did lose me for quite a while in the middle. It just got pretty boring. It did pick up at the end, but overall, it wasn't my favorite Christmas read. I did like Emma, Fletcher, and Lola, though.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book. All the opinions are my own

Emma is a hard working copy editor. She has trouble maintaining a romantic relationship longer than 364 days. When she visits a jewelry store she is surprised to see an e graves watch she bought for her college romantic interest Fletcher. Her friend Bronwynn comes up with the phrase synchronicity encouraging her to head to Vermont where Fletcher is vacationing with daughter Lola and fiancé Megan. Emma decides a relaxing week in Vermont will be a great way to spend the holiday weekend. Will Emma be able to reconnect with Fletcher and his precious daughter. Is a future In store for the Couple?

Christmas in Vermont is a sweet novel brimming with holiday cheer and nostalgia. The story of Emma and Fletcher gave me a lot of vibes of Serendipity the movie. This book was perfect to read for a snowy December afternoon. I did have a couple issues with this book. The pacing of their relationship felt slow in parts. I found myself eager for Fletcher to move on from his current relationship. I did not like the woman he was engaged to at all. I definitely can understand why the writer showed all the details of his current engagement but I would have liked more time to see Emma and Fletcher together. I really enjoyed the flashbacks to the beginnings of the relationship and thought this portion of the story worked well. Christmas in Vermont is low on the steam meter and from my perspective was a clean romance.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

As a fan of Hallmark Christmas movies, I found I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a satisfying love story that makes you believe in Christmas miracles and second chances.

When you find yourself meandering over to the bookstore's holiday section, you usually know what you're going to be getting. There are no surprises in a holiday novel, but readers love them precisely for their predictability so they can escape from the real world. All that being said, it's important that a holiday book have at least some whimsy and warmth and for any book to keep the reader's attention. Even with a title like Christmas in Vermont, I didn't really find either of these in this book.

Emma is a Manhattan copywriter who visits a pawn shop on Christmas Eve. She finds her ex-boyfriend's engraved watch and wonders whatever became of him. Her best friend, Bronwyn, discovers that Fletcher, the ex-boyfriend, is staying in a snowy Vermont inn and sends Emma there. What Bronwyn doesn't know is that Fletcher has a fiance and a daughter.

Christmas, a Vermont Inn, snow -- sounds magical, right? It is in theory, but while holiday novels do require the reader to suspend disbelief at times, this one had way too may "coincidences" to be believed. Hughes calls it "synchronicity" in the book, but it just came off as annoying. Finding ex-boyfriend's engraved watch in a pawn shop? Check. Best friend sends me to the same middle-of-nowhere inn as my ex-boyfriend? Check. I become close with my ex-boyfriend's ten-year-old daughter? Check. Ex-boyfriend has a fight with his fiance and the fiance leaves? Check. You can only guess how it ends.

There are better holiday books out there.

MY RATING - 2

Looking for a cheesy Christmas romance in the vein of Hallmark or a Netflix original? Well, here you go.

Christmas in Vermont was exactly what I expected it to be. It was cliche and predictable. One of those books where you know the ending from the very first pages. But I think there is a market for those types of book, so if that's what you're looking for, it would be right up your alley.

I personally had a hard time with quite a few things in the story that caused me to rate it lower:
1. A 9 year old girl who felt to be more like 12 or 13 at times.
2. A father that let the 9 year old girl roam around a foreign city with very little supervision or guidance.
3. Lots and lots of grammatical errors (I usually don't comment on grammatical errors when I'm reading ARCs because I recognize they haven't gone through the entire editing process, but in this case the errors were distracting and excessive).
4. I despised the way some of the characters reacted to various situations. Characters who fell in and out of love at the snap of a finger, characters who had no backbone/not an independent bone in their body, etc.
5. An overall need to suspend all reality to believe some of the coincidental events within the story.

I previously read Anita Hughes's Christmas at the Chalet and had similar feelings, albeit maybe not as strong. Perhaps this holiday genre that requires one to fully suspend reality is just not my cup of tea.

-I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Anita Hughes, and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to review.-

When I first spotted this advanced reader copy available via Netgalley, I simply knew I had to read it. I live in Vermont, and I love all the warm fuzzies I get when reading a second chance at love romance, especially at Christmastime. I'd also never read anything by this author before, and thought I'd request this title. Well, you know the old saying, "Be careful what you wish for," because it was certainly true of this novel, which got off to a good start and then floundered, which is why I can't give it more than a 2-star rating.

As the novel open, Emma, the heroine, is strolling around the East Village in NYC, it's a little more than a week before Christmas. She's just broken up with her most recent boyfriend, who is en route to Maui without her, although he'd been planning to take her with him. She's a serial breaker-upper who's been in relationships with a number of different men over the years, but she breaks up with them before the year passes--sometimes making it to the 364th day, but never past it. As she's looking in shop windows, she steps inside one of the few shops that are open. It's an antique/second-hand shop, and she's there to sell the Harry Winston gold and emerald bracelet her boyfriend gave her, planning to donate the money to her favorite charity, The Salvation Army. a poor choice of a charity in this reader's opinion, since they have alienated the LGBTQ community. When the shop owner says he can't offer her more than $200 for a bracelet that's probably worth ten times that amount, Emma notices a watch in the glass case and asks to see it. She's surprised to discover that it's the watch she gave the love of her life when they were in college--she'd even had it engraved. The shopkeeper agrees to trade the watch for her emerald bracelet, and when Emma tells her best friend, Bronwyn, about finding the watch, Bronwyn tells her it's syncronicity--that it was a sign that she should seek out her college flame, Fletcher, and see if the chemistry between them was still there. Does Emma do that? Nope, but Bronwyn does, and discovers Fletcher is divorced, has a young daughter, and that he'll be spending the holidays at a B&B in Vermont, and she then gifts Emma with a one-week stay there as her Christmas gift, never mentioning that Fletcher and his daughter are also vacationing there. With some reluctance, and no reason to stay in the city, Emma packs her bags and drives north.

When Emma arrives, she learns that the inn's kid club employee is ill, and Emma agrees to fill in for her, and it's not long before she meets the only child she'll be entertaining, Fletcher's adorable and precocious 9-year-old daughter, Lola. It's also not long before she spots Fletcher with a beautiful blonde woman, his fiance, Megan. As the coincidences pile up, and pile up they do, Emma is still drawn to Fletcher, who is now a famous play director who had been living and working in London, but had been back in the U.S. for about 9 months. His fiance, Megan, is totally unlikable, thinks Lola is a brat, and seems to be engaged to Fletcher because she believes she can convince him to replace the Tony-winning actress who is about to star in his Broadway play, an updated version of Father of the Bride. Megan wants that role. When Emma learns that the sweet widow who runs the inn is about to lose it, she, Lola, and the owner of the local playhouse decide to run a benefit concert to save the inn. If this doesn't remind you of the old film classic, White Christmas, where two former GIs try to save the inn owned by their elderly, retired and former Army superior, you're obviously not a fan of classic films.

While the novel is filled with scenes of the charm and warmth of a Vermont Christmas getaway, it does contain some factual errors, the most glaring error was that Norman Rockwell was born in Vermont--when it took me less than 5 seconds to verify that he was born in New York City, lived in Vermont for several years, but moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where there is a lovely museum dedicated to him and his work. Why the author decided to include the misinformation in her novel escapes me, and I hope her error was caught before the book went to press.

As the novel went on, I became aware that I thought Emma was more than a little strange. She strikes up a friendship with Lola, whose father, Fletcher, is basically led around by his self-absorbed fiance, whom he claims to love, but heaven knows why. They've only known each other for a few months, and it's clear he's got blinders on when it comes to her treatment of his daughter, the daughter he too tends to ignore in favor of keeping his fiance happy. Emma becomes Lola's de facto friend and confidante, but when Lola tells her how badly Megan treats her, does Emma bother to inform Fletcher? Nope. She simply feeds the girl platitudes, like "Oh, I'm sure she loves you!" and "Give her time to get used to being your stepmom, " and other drivel.

Since this is a Christmas romance, it was obvious from the get-go that Fletcher and Emma would rediscover their feelings for one another, but as one contrived scene led to another, and yet another, I already disliked Megan, and then fell into dislike with Emma and Fletcher, both of whom seemed to fall into and out of love far too quickly. No sooner did Megan break their engagement when Fletcher suddenly realized his love for Emma--give me a break!

If you're looking for a scenic and charming Christmas read, and don't want to delve too deeply into the rather shallow relationships between the main characters within it, you'll probably find this novel more to your liking that I did. As for me, it found it too contrived, and felt that it had too much surface and not enough substance or depth for this reader. I also disliked the sense that every town in Vermont is a winter wonderland, that every business was thriving, and that everyone who lived and worked there was well-off. There's a lot of poverty in Vermont, many towns are floundering financially, and many Main Streets are filled with empty storefronts. As Emma kept driving through these towns toward the B&B, no mention was made of these issues, and for someone who chose to live here, I wished the author had addressed that issue instead of making it seems as if every town Emma drove through was a charming, snow-covered, winter wonderland, because that's just not the case.

As stated, I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions expressed are my own.

Emma has recently broken up with another wrong guy and while purging some of the boyfriend things, she stumbles upon something from her past and through the help of a friend she may stumble back upon the guy that got away.

With me and Anita Hughes books, I either really love them or not so much and I usually know pretty quickly into reading, so I was so excited when from page one I was swept into this story.

Emma was such a fun character to follow and this book just reminded me of all of the perfectly cheesy Christmas movies that are great to watch during the holidays. The ups and downs that Emma and Fletcher go through in this book were just at the right moments and this book had just that bit of Christmas magic!

I loved that in this book one of the big plot things that happens in romance happened in this book two - right when you think things will go right there is a twist and the characters have to make the final decision whether they will fall in love or part ways. I love in a romance book when this happens and am always intrigued as to how the author will throw a wrench in things and then how will the characters overcome it to get to the happy ending - love it!

I hope that there are more books just like this one in Anita Hughes' future!