A review by sprinkledwithwords
The MacGregor Brides by Nora Roberts

4.0

Daniel MacGregor yearns for great-grandchildren before he passes away, but his granddaughters are taking far too long to settle down. So what does he do? Begin meddling, of course! However, Laura, Gwen and Julia aren’t going to make it easy for him. Can Daniel do it – and not suffer their raging wraths?

I really, really enjoyed this book. Well, the three novellas it included (yes, there are three separate stories within this novel). So I’ll work in chronological order.

First up was Laura’s story. Now, she was my favourite character. Perfectly feisty, witty and hilarious, I really enjoyed reading about her and was sad when her story ended. I think hers should have started first, to be honest; in my opinion, Gwen and Julia didn’t quite live up to her. Her story, concerning a certain Royce, was romantic even though they initially, of course, didn’t like each other, and they had plenty of hurdles from Laura’s lawyer-ship and her parents going a bit nuts when they, er, caught them together, to the alarms going off and Royce being attacked with snowballs.

Second was Gwen, the doctor. Her relationship with the Irish novelist Branson was interesting, to say the least. Branson, originally there to do research on Dr Gwen’s ward, soon began to like her more than he perhaps should. I thought he was the perfect man and kinda fell in love with him a little. I mean, how more romantic can you get? Besides his rants about writing and just in general were pretty cool, and he seemed to live to wind Gwen up. However, I thought Gwen was a bit cruel to him and strung him along a bit.

Lastly was Julia, and her beau Cullum. Cullum and Julia had the perfect sparky relationship everyone wants, and her uncertainness in the relationship contrasted brilliantly with her otherwise collected persona. Their relationship was hot and sexy but then turned out to be more romantic, if a little high-school-ly with them fighting over who said the three little words first.

I really liked Roberts’ writing style; fast paced and witty, and the characters were unique and had their own relationships but seemed to fit together like a very large MacGregor jigsaw puzzle. However, I thought that the relationships would have been better if they had been intertwined rather than written in separate time frames. And they all finished, stereotypically, at Christmas time, although I kind of already knew that considering the ‘Christmas Fairytales’ title and the romance genre! But, I really adored Daniel MacGregor as a separate character and his relationship with his wife, so I guess that helped me a lot; and the MacGregor Christmas lunches are clearly an affair to behold!

I would recommend this read to those who like fluffy Christmas-y romances, although this does contain some steamy sex scenes, so beware of that if that’s the type of stuff you’d rather avoid. A light-hearted read!