Today, I’m heading back to the world of the BSC for a Christmas review. This entry comes from rather late into the series’s life as this is the ninety-second book. It’s a decent read and the story is serviceable for the holidays.
Cover
This book has us following Mallory, one of the junior officers of the BSC and her family as they filmed by a television crew hoping to capture them having an old-fashioned Christmas. This cover encapsulates the tone of the book rather well as the film crew gets in the way and as Mallory describes it, they at one point sap away her Christmas spirit. It sucks but that is the truth of the matter. This cover highlights how they thought something might have helped them was too much of a nuisance to put up with.
The Plot
Well, I kind of gave you the plot covering the cover. The Pike family who are a rather large family as pictured here have been selected to have their holiday outings filmed after daughter Vanessa entered them in a contest.
At first this seems good as the family is on the bigger side and it comes with ten thousand dollars which they could use as Mr. Pike recently lost his job but he has landed back on his feet. So, they at first agree to let themselves be filmed. But it soon proves to be a headache as the film crew ruin the family outings such as nearly getting the family kicked out of a mall for cutting line to see Santa. Well, that’s one way to get on the naughty list.
There is also this sense the film crew doesn’t care about the family and just wants to use them for ratings. Shocker I know. There’s also a subplot about the BSC putting on a Christmas boutique at an elderly home and this is where the two plots converge as Mallory’s Uncle Joe who has Alzheimer’s lives here and this allows Mallory to better connect with her uncle who is a bit grumpy but that seems to come with the territory of old characters in material aimed at kids. There is a moment where the film crew show up at elderly home the BSC are helping at and make so much of a mess that they are asked to never return and almost cause Uncle Joe to cut off contact with the family.
Yeah, they are sucking out of the joy of Christmas and that can be a bit of a drag to read but part of me thinks that was the point as it seems like if something is too good to be true, it probably is. Again, a bit of a simplified message and while I like to think Christmas spirit can have a strong resolve, I get how people barging in and disrupting your life and making you do shoot after shoot would upend that. That’s why by Christmas Eve, the family agrees that they no longer want to be filmed and ask the crew to leave and give back the ten thousand dollars as the stress isn’t worth the money.
My Final Thoughts
Overall, this was a cute and serviceable book but at times it did feel like the series had run out of steam by this point. It’s not bad as I enjoyed reading it but I don’t know that I’ll come back to it. I’m more likely to stick the Christmas episode from the nineties tv show for this time of year more than anything else.
Again, not bad but not something I’m in a rush to return to anytime soon.
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