Audiobook Review: The White Christmas Inn

Author: Colleen Wright

Narrator: Samantha Desz

Audiobook Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

A New England inn seems like the picture-perfect place to spend the holidays. But when a snowstorm shuts the roads and keeps them all inside, the guests find themselves worrying that this Christmas may not be exactly what they dreamed of.

Molly just needs to keep her head down and finish her latest book, but her writer’s block is crippling. The arrival of Marcus, a handsome widower with two young girls, is exactly the distraction she doesn’t need.

Hannah was hoping for a picturesque winter wedding, but her plans come crashing down when her fiancé calls everything off. She reconnects with her childhood friend, Luke, when he comes to check on his grandmother before the storm.

Jeanne and Tim don’t know how they’re going to keep the inn open another year—or how to bridge the distance between them in their marriage. With a flurry of unexpected guests, they’ll have to work together to fix all the problems that crop up. But will it be enough to rekindle their relationship?

As the characters’ stories intertwine, they start to find hope where they thought it had been lost. With faith, and a little bit of Christmas magic, the inn—and its inhabitants—might just make it through the holidays after all.

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The White Christmas Inn features an ensemble cast of characters brought together a cozy inn in Vermont. The story begins with each chapter introducing the main characters and then gradually their stories all weave together. When Molly Winslow first arrives at the Evergreen Inn, the magical wintery setting is introduced and makes the reader want to visit ASAP. Molly is attempting to cure her writer’s block to complete her next children’s book. At the inn Jeanne and Tim, the owners are introduced where they love their business, but it is not as profitable as they had hoped. They believe that this will be the last season they will be open.

Over time, the other characters are introduced as they make their appearances at the inn. There is widower Marcus who shows up without a reservation and desperation for room to shelter from the blizzard along with his two young daughters, Bailey and Addison.  Hannah arrives at the inn where she supposed to be getting married to her fiancé Trevor. When he calls off the wedding, this gives Hannah a chance to reconnect with her childhood friend, Luke, who helps out at the inn. Other characters are fellow guest Geoffrey Godwin, an inn helper, Iris, and Hannah’s matron-of-honor, Audrey, who was hoping to have this weekend to have a break with her husband, Jared.

The snowstorm was a nice touch to bring most of the characters together and create a cozy setting with some forced proximity. As there are multiple characters to track, there is not a big opportunity to delve deeper into each character and their development; however, they were easy to track and are enjoyable. Ensemble casts are fun as it gives readers options for which character they connect with/like the most/least (if any). There were some characters that I was fonder of in the beginning of the story, but I enjoyed each of them equally towards the end. Overall, this is a nice easy holiday novel. While I would have liked more development and a deeper exploration of the characters, it was still enjoyable and was a nice wintery read.