My mistake here was to spend A Weekend in New York with the Essinger family. When it came to spending Christmas with them as well, I just couldn’t manage it. As Christmas is the season of goodwill I gave of my best but after a few pages I realised I was just not up to spending more time with this prickly, defensive, constantly sniping at each other, solipsistic family. I soon lost the will to live and made my excuses and left.

An enjoyable read a book of family that drew me I from first pages.Really enjoyed getting to know the characters.#netgalley#faber&faber.

Christmas in Austin by Benjamin Markovits shouldn’t work, but it does. It is a family story, that takes place over a week at Christmas and is crammed with every detail - food, (many, many meals), bedtimes, car journeys, you name it, it’s us described in the novel. Because Markovits gets under the skin of each and every member of the family, I cared very much about them. Bigger things do happen - there is a death in the family, relationships are fraught and possibly disintegrating, but it is the internal voices that are at the heart of this book. I didn’t realise until I finished it that this is the second in a trilogy so I will be looking up the first part, although, for me, this worked well as a stand-alone wrk.

I enjoyed this very much. It's well written, with plenty going on to keep a reader interested.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This would have been a lot better if the author picked less characters to focus on. I felt that there was too much going on to invest in the characters. It seemed as soon as I was invested in the story of someone that the author would focus on someone else.

Christmas in Austin by Benjamin Markovits makes some perceptive observations about adult sibling relationships.

Even if it's well written and there's a lot of character development I found hard to follow as there's a lot of characters and subplot and it was confusing.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Although there was too much going on, I enjoyed this book. I love a Christmas heart warming romance, so that's what it delivered to me. I also read the author's previous book, so I was familiar with his style.
Thanks a lot to Netgalley and the publisher for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was a novel that I couldn’t enjoy because it was TOO CROWDED. Too many characters, too many sub-plots, insufficient development. I felt I needed a large family tree in front of me.

I found the end very unsatisfying. This was a real disappointment.

Thanks Netgalley for this novel.

Sometimes,I like to read something I wouldn't normally pick up.
So I went for this family drama,based around the children coming home for Christmas.
The staggered arrival of the adult children meant it was easy enough to remember who was who,and their relationships to other people.
There was enough drama along the way,dying relatives,storms,introduction of possibly not suitable partner....
Non of it kept me interested though,and I actually gave up reading 10% from the end.
Just not my thing.

Lovely festive read. It was a heart warming romance. It was a wonderful book to read. It was well written and flowed well.