This Year It Will Be Different

I recommend that you sit down by the fireplace or Christmas tree and read this book during the Holidays. It will make you feel great inside. The stories are short and heart-warming to the soul.

The atmosphere around the end of the year is always peculiar, it is specially "crazy", there's a lot of fuss, people are running here and there with their Christmas shopping, we experiment a plethora of mixed feelings and emotions such as melancholy and excitment, and it's mainly the time to think about and evaluate the finishing year. Binchy is a master at capturing these kinds of mood and expressing them in this outstanding collection of 15 short stories. There are some interesting ones about single women who date married men and their turning points that will arrive with the season. Again, the author offers us dialogues that make the characters real and believable - Binchy proves she is perfect at writing both short compact stories and long, full of details, engrossing novels. Pay special attention to "The Ten Snaps of Christmas", about a teenage girl who gets a Polaroid camera and decides to take some "secret pictures" as her Xmas day goes by. It shows readers how families can be hypocritical. What kinds of snapshots would we come across if we had the chance of taking them? And also enjoy the tale of a hard-working carer in an Australian home struggling with a group of four very difficult old people entitled "The Hard Core". After a year or so you will probably have forgotten many details, and it will be a pleasure to read these stories again and have some new insights.

I bought all of Maeve Binchy's books back in May. I saved this one for December because I figured it would be the perfect month to enjoy reading Christmas stories. Was I ever right!! This book was fantastic! Beats her other collections with a stick--and that's a tough job. Plus, the short story format is such a breath of fresh air. I caught myself driving down the road catching a glimpse of this book laying on the passenger seat and saying, "That right there is a great book!"

Maeve Binchy has povided a series of short stories about the holiday season and how it affects people. Many are bitter sweet, some are just plain sad, while others provide hope and insight. While some people may say that the character development is not what you would normally expect from a Binchy story, the fact that these are short stories make the task all the more impressive. Each story hits a nerve. My particular sensitive spot was relfected in the story of the "difficult" step daughter who eats all of the hors d'oerves to the horror of the step mom only to think that they were going to decorate her bedroom for her. An instant bond is built between the two women, one young and one old. Age differences, women in love with married men, widows dealing with the holidays and people with dreams. This is an excellent book for the holiday season. It is easy to read and would make an excellent gift.

As always, Binchy's stories stand out for two reasons: interesting, page turning plots and characters, and unpredictability. You may not be able to depend on happy endings and all loose ends neatly tied together in any of her fiction. But as always, you can look forward to learning something about human nature, and being highly entertained in the process. If you liked her other books, you will not be disappointed