All I Want for Christmas by Nora Roberts

Narrated by Patrick Lawlor

All twin boys Zeke and Zach want for Christmas is The Mom. Their own mom split when they were infants, so they don’t really know what it would be like. Just before first grade starts in September, they realize their dad might be too busy to help them with scary new school duties. They decide to ask Santa to bring them The Mom for Christmas, so she can help out dad, and they won’t ask for anything else (except bikes). It’s a cute Christmas premise, and they decide Santa has answered their request when new high school music teacher Nell Davis enters their lives and fulfills their requirements one by one. She likes their dog; she smells good; she can even tell the difference between them. And in a peculiarly Nora touch, each time there’s another match to the boys’ wishlist, there’s the sound of jingle bells off in the distance… Now if they can only convince their dad to get ready for her!

All I Want for Christmas, a 1994 Christmas short story was originally released in 2007 by Harlequin Enterprises with a different narrator. My rating at the time was pretty low, mainly because narrator Lauren Davis sounded about 10 years old, and it was downright creepy to hear a 10 year old read “Make love to me, Mac”, even if she did an okay job voicing the 6-year-old twins. I could understand it if the publisher thought it was a children’s story, but it’s obvious Harlequin Enterprises is an adult line, so I dunno what they were thinking. I wasn’t the only one appalled – read the reviews at Audible.

Apparently someone in Nora-land decided to give it another shot, and a different publisher hired a real narrator, Patrick Lawlor, to do it right. It’s still just a short story, without too much character or plot development – the boys scheme to get dad on board, and dad/Mac resists his feelings, not too sure of Nell’s motives when she pays attention to the youngsters. It doesn’t seem to stretch Lawlor too much – he does an adequate job of voicing the little boys without making them too cute, and a good job with Mac and Nell and the other characters in their small town.

This Brilliance Audio recording is not available at Audible. The MP3 version released in November 2013 is available from Amazon or from Brilliance via AudiobookStand, however. The original Brilliance/Lawlor recording was released on CD in 2009, according to Amazon’s listing. There is no publisher information on the recording itself (like copyright and publication dates) so I’m just going by what I found at Amazon. If you follow the link on Amazon to the Audible recording, you will get the Lauren Davis/Harlequin Enterprises version, so caveat emptor.

Melinda

Narration: B+

Book Content: C-

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence: none

Genre: Contemporary Romance, holiday themed

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

All I Want for Christmas was provided to AudioGals for review by Brilliance Audio.