The Brightest Star: A Heartwarming Christmas Novel

This was the perfect Seasonal fun story with a biographical twist where a novelist meets the son of her perspective biography assignment and love blooms. I was even more enticed that the values of compassion, kindness and truth were blended into the story. That the entrepreneurs had a business fictionally mirroring “Amazon” was also hilarious and exciting with some fun ‘high tech’ scenes tossed in, which added excitement. The realistic settings created a story where dreams Can come true! Very well-written. Lovely characters! I’d have enjoyed a sequel!

This book is a rushed, jumbled, unbelievable mess! Who would transfer funds to a fifteen year old
that they met a few times.... Lauren also meets a man she childishly calls "Mr Hunk" and lo and behold
after meeting him a few times more marries him. That is the last book I will buy from this author.
Her books do not make any sense anymore, and are a complete waste of time and money!

The Brightest Star by Fern Michaels is a well written, heartwarming novel about Lauren who is a successful author and returns home to run the family Christmas decorations store while her mother cares for her father who is ill. Lauren then steps in and helps a young high school girl and her seriously ill mother. Fern Michaels is a favorite author of mine and she is to be commended for writing such a touching, heartfelt story. The characters were carefully crafted and created and were perfect for this book. I would have liked it better if John were introduced into the storyline sooner and included the blossoming attraction/romance between Lauren and John earlier in the novel instead of closer to the end. I rated it a four.

Reading enjoyment.

The story is about a 35 YO successful biographical author of 3 best sellers, Lauren, who drops the life she has been building herself (quite happily) in FL to rush home and help her parents run their decor store in her hometown of North Carolina when her father is diagnosed with a debilitating illness and her mother becomes his primary caregiver. When she gets there she realizes the store is slowly failing and as the story starts, she realized she needs to put her own finances into the business to keep it afloat.

So after all but giving up writing, she is offered the opportunity of a lifetime to write a biography of a online retail mogul that will secure her future and help save her struggling publisher, plus give her money to replenish the amount she is about to dump into the antiquated store in order to save it.

Rather than it being a “no-brainer” and enthusiastic “Yes!”, she struggles with the decision because she is afraid (!) of what her parents (who, by my calculation are roughly in their 60’s) will think.

Here is why - the sick father is an awful curmudgeon who is disrespectful and blind to reality. As a previous reviewer mentioned, he is unimaginably stuck in the 50’s (okay, maybe the 70’s) way of doing things in the store, including still using the sliding credit card devices that use a mimeograph sheet of paper. Seriously? The internet has now been around for 20 years and this story is set in present day. It’s ridiculously unbelievable that he would be so against technology that his daughter has to resort to subterfuge and hiding any type of innovation she is working to introduce to the store she is now running, all to avoid his willful stubbornness and almost abusive passive-aggressive anger about change.

The Mom is a wet blanket who does not stand up for her daughter and at best, stays silent about the changes, and at worst just backs up the father’s opinions while making light of her daughter’s highly successful writing career.

Honestly, although her parents are described as well-liked around the town, there is literally no sense at all of that - no friends dropping by with casseroles, no friendly townspeople stopping in to the store to chat and see how the parents are faring… no real connection at all with the idea that these are kind, generous, and well-liked people.

The story gets muddled when a teen comes into the store with some friends and buys a gift for her very sick mother, who it turns out the main character knows, but not well. To help this teen, whom Lauren has known for about an hour, Lauren contorts herself into making connections through a teacher friend (by visiting the teacher, at the school, being allowed to go down to the teachers classroom, DURING the school day, which in and of itself is so far fetched and utterly ridiculous in this day and age given that every school in the country now requires background checks to even bring your OWN kid a lunch, that I needed to put the book down for several days out of sheer disgust at how ridiculous the idea even is) to save the mother and keep her in the hospital because clearly she knows more than the mother’s own doctors about her state of health and where she should be while she waits for treatment, which Lauren has also decided to figure out how to pay for… despite the fact that this girl is living with her best friend and her friends wealthy parents, who’ve clearly known the girl for years and years… but whatever, I digress.

Meanwhile, even though this is, in theory a Christmas story, Christmas is barely mentioned other than the fact that the store has some Christmas decorations and sells expensive, hand-crafted, glass ornaments to one customer who buys them all and drives away in their new Porsche (not really even sure why that’s included in the story other than as a plot device that shows you this store really caters exclusively to the wealthy).

Finally, about 75% of the way into the story, we meet the love interest. Up until this point it hasn’t been a love story at all, but rather a story about a woman trying to help her family, re-build her career, and find satisfaction in meaningful, albeit over/the-top, gestures of giving.

At this point, many of the other subplots that have been built into the story fall to the wayside as though they were just marginal plot devices and not the bulk of the whole story. Including her father’s miraculous medication, which makes him kick her out of the store claiming she’s been doing a terrible job and it’s her fault sales have been on the decline, despite having sunk enough of her own m money into the business to keep it afloat for several months.

We spend the next several chapters in Seattle with the love interest and Lauren’s interviews and relationship building with the mogul and his family. We hear practically nothing about what’s happening with all the other major stories from home.

Finally she returns home, and is only able to convince her family to improve the store because another old man convinces her Dad to do it. He still would not listen to her.

Ugh. And the love story is just blah. There’s no tension or build up. Just - they looked at each other, talked during a plane flight, and now are committed to each other for the rest of their lives.

So disappointing on so many levels. Don’t waste your money or even your time on this one…

This was an enjoyable book to read but I think it was rushed in so many ways. The dad’s sick, then he’s all better, an old friend from school is sick, but then one phone call gets her all taken care of, she’s asked to write a book, and ends up with the guys son, everything is too pat, too quickly over, and just doesn’t seem very plausible. But if you take it as a Christmas story, we’ll all dreams come true don’t they!