Bundle of Joy: A Christmas Single Dad Secret Baby Romance

This is a super fast holiday story where a single dad meets a young woman that he’s attracted to. Within days they have a professional and sexual relationship. The characters don’t have time to develop except for their first impressions.

Daniel is a single father and is having his son’s birthday party at the ski resort. Charlie is used to getting his way by throwing a fit however Catherine has a way of smoothing things over with him that stuns even Daniel. So much that Daniel offers her the nanny position with Charlie. At first she says she needs to think it over but when she loses her job she accepts his offer. Sparks fly between them right between them right from the start. Soon things went from professional to personal between them. When she learns that a co-worker is suing their former work for wrongful termination Catherine starts to question whether Daniel had something to do with her losing her job too. Will Daniel explain why he called the resort? What will Daniel do when Catherine tells him that she’s pregnant?

This is a great story once I started it I couldn’t put it down. The chemistry between them is off the charts hot. This is a well written and very entertaining story. I would recommend this book to any book lover.

I voluntarily read and reviewed this book.

Ho ho ho!… Humbug…

When I “borrowed” this book via KU, I felt the blurb made it worth my time reading it. As it is, my reading time is valuable, and I hate wasting it on a poorly written book. Though I didn’t see much of the usual grammatical problems, I was rather dissatisfied with the plot line.

The main characters – Daniel, Catherine, and Charlie – are trapped in the plot template of husband and son abandoned by the wife/mother who was sexually mature to produce a child but mentally so totally unprepared to be a mother. Charlie, the son, is acting out terribly. Enter Catherine who was a seasonal ski instructor at a local resort who immediately bonds with him. But a misunderstanding separates Daniel and Catherine. Daniel hunts her down, and somehow in the span of a small epilogue, everything is explained, including her unplanned pregnancy, and everyone kisses and makes up. The End.

Boring!…

Length and pace: I would call this a longer novella, not a novel. The pace in the beginning was fine, but the end was too much of a whirlwind finish. I found the entire “epilogue” as a massive deus ex machine, one I wished the author didn’t resort to. Also, her using the epilogue to tie of all the loose threads (as she did) was entirely an inappropriate use of an epilogue. Keep that in the standard structure of the novella BUT give me a clue how things went. Did Catherine finally agreed for their engagement to be announced? Did they get married? Boy or girl? Come on! That’s the purpose of an epilogue. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this done. (Shakes the head…)

Characters: You know? If you asked me to describe Catherine and Daniel, I wouldn’t be able to. I didn’t seem to be all that sympathetic to anyone of them! Well, I didn’t feel like bitch-slapping Charlie. That’s a first. Usually I don’t tolerate fools, idiots, and hypocrites well, but I do work well with problematic children. But even Charlie’s character file was sadly lacking. It was as if Jamie Knight was having a difficult time deciding if Charlie should be acting like a rich, little brat now or a nicer, kinder version. I really didn’t feel all that sympathetic towards Catherine or Daniel. These two were so wishy-washy, waffling all over the place. We are told by Daniel that he is a tough boss to work for, yet he comes across as being terribly sympathetic the moment he enters his home. I just didn’t make sense. And Catherine comes across as the Child Whisperer… not. It’s just not all that believable… any of these characters. I wish Knight has spent more time developing their profiles so that I would care about them… Oh! I forgot… This is just a novella, not a novel! Doesn’t matter. Characters need to be realistic. I need to be sympathetic towards them. But it didn’t happen this time.

Hero/Heroine interaction: Speaking about coming across in a believable fashion, these two… so TOTALLY uncharacteristic. It isn’t even twelve hours into her new nanny job when Catherine loses her virginity to Daniel, and BOOM! She goes from being completely sexually inexperienced to being able to deep-throat without any discomfort or gagging? Now don’t tell me she’s been practicing with a cucumber until Mr. Right came along. If that was the case, she would have asked to be placed on some kind of effective birth control as a precaution! Somehow, I must have missed the part of the book where they actually had some meaningful conversation, or the author didn’t sell me the fact that these two were sooo into each other that they have sex on Day One, going from cold to hot in just a few hours? Nope. Not buying that either. And the predictable ending where he explains everything, and everything is now righted? The problem is that the writer did not adequately develop these characters. Sad, but it could had been a better story of a novel length had she taken the time to work on it properly.

World-creation: I think we’re in New York City… right? I could had been in Boston, too, but… Well, you can obviously see that I wasn’t impressed at all with the location. So little time was spent on developing the background.

Continuity and editing: The progression was choppy, especially at the end. The more I think about it, the more I felt that the author should had been more aggravated with the time she wasted on this book. I mean, if I were writing it, I would want to make sure that it was all worth the effort, but it wasn’t. As for editing, I found a lot of phrases missing keywords. Wrong words but spelled correctly (the problem with relying solely on a spellchecker for problems). I had this strong feeling that this book didn’t get the proper research because the location, the house, the entire background were so superficial. I never got into my head what the main locales really looked like.

Realism: Terrible. As previously mentioned, everything was so superficial, it wasn’t memorable. Normally I get agitated when a story takes on legalities as it sets up an air of aggravation with loss of control. That never happened here! Probably because I hadn’t invested any of my interest in this story. I never found out if Catherine’s baby was a girl or a boy. Did she have a successful delivery? Was Charlie happy with his new sibling? I never even heard boo about the prodigal wife. I mean, was Daniel even properly divorced? In his explanation, the no-name wife disappeared, probably in a puff of crack cocaine, and never came back. And then the writer suggests that she’s staying away because she did’t want to pay child support? HUH????? After all the talk about how filthy rich Daniel is, the wife is even more so? How could she, if we are to believe Daniel that she’s an addict. How can an addict keep a job like that?? Way to weird and unrealistic.

I don’t recommend wasting time on this book beyond the blurb which was more exciting than the book. I’m glad I didn’t spend money on it. Thank you, KU!