A Piggly Wiggly Christmas by Robert Dalby

This could have been such a charming cute little book, but there were some large flaws that just kept it from being excellent. And while they don’t take up too much of the story, they still managed to take a good chunk of that charm away. This is technically the 4th book in the series and while I’ve never read any of the others, I don’t feel that I’ve missed much.

As part of the Nitwitts, Gaylie Girl is determined to think of a good charity event to put on this Christmas. Finally she lands on Christmas caroling in their town square on the balconies so as to be “angels heard on high”. Setting about with her friends to recruit church choirs for the show they run into all sorts of personalities. But then disaster strikes and the Nitwitts aren’t sure what to do. It looks like their Christmas caroling project might be put on hold permanently.

Gaylie Girl was a little too perfect in my mind. No flaws that I could see anyway, aside from her actually being called “Gaylie Girl” through the entire novel. Her husband, despite being mayor, was kind of just a side character which was surprising to me. The other Nitwitts seemed to have extremes of personality and it was hard to really identify with any of them. I think the character I really did like in this book was probably the rich lady who was determined to be a star. At least she was amusing.

My real problem with the book would probably be some of the racist comments that were made in regards to the different choirs. While there were just a few in the front of the book, it sat in the back of my mind the whole book and was very distasteful. I know this book is set in the South, but its the modern south and while racism does go on today still, I don’t think this book needed that realism being that it was supposed to be a cute Christmas story. Just be warned. As said, this could have been a very charming book. It had all the right elements and storyline, it just didn’t have strong characters and the few comments that made it distasteful. But those were enough to bring down the writing for me.

I probably won’t return to this author as a result of this book. I just couldn’t appreciate what he was trying to do.

A Piggly Wiggly Christmas
Copyright 2010
268 pages

Review by M. Reynard 2011


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