Product Description

Readers flocked home to Mitford last Christmas, making The Mitford Snowmen a New York Times bestseller.

In Esther's Gift, Esther Bolick is filled with the holiday spirit as she prepares to bake the annual batch of her famous-and utterly scrumptious-orange marmalade cakes. Right after Christmas Eve service at Lord's Chapel, she and Gene will deliver a two-layer marmalade to each of seven friends and neighbors, all of them favorite Mitford characters. Then Gene calculates what it costs to bake this legendary cake, and Esther is stunned. Is it worth it to spend so much money on people who haven't always measured up to her expectations? The answer is clear. She'll cut her list back-way back.

This decision makes perfect sense until the lyrics of a Christmas carol steal into her heart, and help remind her what a gift really means.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43646 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-28
• Released on: 2004-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 37 pages

From Library Journal
Esther isn't so sure that she should spend so much time and money making her famous two-layer marmalade cake for holiday gifts but then she remembers the meaning of Christmas.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Jan Karon writes to "give readers an extended family and to applaud the extraordinary beauty of ordinary lives."

Customer Reviews

Nothing more than a "spinoff"
I am a great fan of all the Mitford books--and I could tell this wasn't going to be as long as any of them just by its size in hardcover. But the people who say this takes a few minutes to read, and no more, aren't kidding. And it's not even worth reading for that long. Jan Karon took one scene--I'm not kidding you--and made a whole "book" out of it. It's one thing to know an author is going to "trade on" a household brand name like the Mitford series to sell a few more copies of something...it's another thing entirely to have that author try to pass off a "spinoff" side product as another book in itself. This is an embarrassment, and I can't imagine how anyone talked Ms. Karon into doing it.

If you paid full price for this thing, send it back and ask for a refund!

Sharing the Christmas Spirit
This tiny book by my favorite author, Jan Karon, captures the true spirit of Christmas, give from the heart. You will love it!

Not worth the price
"Esther's Gift" is subtitled "A Mitford Christmas Story" and might be more enjoyable for devotees of the Mitford series. I have read the first two Mitford novels and found this story too insubstantial to stand alone.

The plot, or what passes for one, is simple: Esther is trying to decide whether to give her traditional cakes for Christmas. She weighs the costs with the help of her husband and then makes her decision. All of this takes 32 pages, at least nine of which are nothing but pictures. In other words, this book is about the length of a short short story. In fact, I imagine this story is about the length of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" (just over 2,000 words).

The story seems little more than an anecdote, something that would fill a few pages in a Mitford novel and contribute to the overall sense of the town, but not nearly enough to stand on its own or carry an entire physical book. It almost feels as if the product itself is antithetical to the theme within. The story's theme is about being generous and so forth, but the story, packaged and priced as if there were more here, seems a little too cynically marketed for me--even with the recipe at the end.