Carrie Blake, from North Carolina, feels it's time to move on from caring for other people's children to having a family of her own. This short-term job in Virginia over Christmas and New Year will be the last. Already looking ahead, she doesn't realise that this will be A CHRISTMAS TO REMEMBER.

Having lost touch with her friends every time she moved jobs, Carrie has come to depend on self-help books - but none of them covers working for a handsome, well-off single dad. The two kids seem polite and well-behaved - more than is natural. Is Adam Fletcher a strict father, or is it just that they would rather be with their mother, who is abroad? They're not used to being with their father for Christmas. Carrie will be on call twenty-four hours, so yet again she'll have no social life. Except with Adam, who makes her feel nervous. He's a businessman, who owns a local brewery.

I could empathise with Carrie who seems a really genuine person; over thirty, she's devoted herself to the job she loves but to the exclusion of social clubs, dances and boyfriends. Now realising that she's missing out, and has no home of her own, she lacks confidence around successful people while college courses don't seem to offer a better choice of job. Watching her teaching the small kids to play as they help her make pancakes is fun, even for readers who don't like soppy bits. Adam is a self-made workaholic who assumes that the children are better off with their mother, providing for them but not spending time with them. He puts his life on hold too. The nanny has no right to interfere, especially when she is a very temporary employee. We know that won't stop Carrie from trying; in the interests of the children, of course.

There is a lot to like in this well-written but, by turns tense and touching account of becoming braver and wanting improvement. Carrie is not a conventional heroine, but she is every woman, and she deserves more out of life just as we all do. A CHRISTMAS TO REMEMBER is the first book I've read by Jenny Hale, but it will not be the last.