Gifts of Love

Gifts of Love by Kay Hooper and Lisa Kleypas are two great Christmas Historical romance stories. Holiday Spirit by Kay Hooper's tells the story/mystery of two romances. The first couple broke their engagement over lies and the second couple are ghosts.... Surrender, Lisa Kleypas tells the story of conflict of Irish and aristocratic Bostonians. This story was a about married couple who had to grow into their love. A great stories anytime of the year. I love Kleypas but now I am off to find more by Hooper.

It was an easy read and really good, I reccomend it to all.

I read this book for the Kleypas story and have not read the Hooper story. I really liked the Kleypas story "Surrender" about a very determined Irish man in the late 1800's who makes it out of the slums of Boston and marries the very sheltered daughter of a Boston Brahmin family who he meets through her brother, his college friend. He tells himself he wants her because she represents his finally "making it to the top" and doesn't admit to even himself that he married her because he loves her. At the same time, he doesn't feel good enough for her and feels firmly caught between two distant strata of society. His wife, on the other hand, doesn't care about his origins but is at first out of her depth trying to live with this intense, torn man. It's a great story and I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't already read it in a previous anthology of Kleypas' called A CHRISTMAS PRESENT (other authoresses were Loretta Chase and Judith French). I understand the decision to republish this story in another Christmas grouping but it is nevertheless irritating how often it is done. So FYI if someone out there has already read other Kleypas anthologies and doesn't remember which ones, you might have already read this story. This book costs quite a lot to find out that you have already read half of it before.