Title: Winter Street, Winter Stroll, Winter Storms, Winter Solstice
Author: Elin Hilderbrand
Genre: Holiday, Women’s Fiction
Published On: Oct. 14, 2014; Oct. 13, 2015; Oct. 4, 2016; Oct. 3, 2017
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Pages: 249, 263, 246, 262

Winter Street Synopsis*

Kelley Quinn is the owner of Nantucket’s Winter Street Inn and the proud father of four, all of them grown and living in varying states of disarray. Patrick, the eldest, is a hedge fund manager with a guilty conscience. Kevin, a bartender, is secretly sleeping with a French housekeeper named Isabelle. Ava, a school teacher, is finally dating the perfect guy but can’t get him to commit. And Bart, the youngest and only child of Kelley’s second marriage to Mitzi, has recently shocked everyone by joining the Marines.

As Christmas approaches, Kelley is looking forward to getting the family together for some quality time at the inn. But when he walks in on Mitzi kissing Santa Claus (or the guy who’s playing Santa at the inn’s annual party), utter chaos descends. With the three older children each reeling in their own dramas and Bart unreachable in Afghanistan, it might be up to Kelley’s ex-wife, nightly news anchor Margaret Quinn, to save Christmas at the Winter Street Inn.


*I won’t include the synopsis’ from the other three books to avoid spoilers, but they continue the Quinn family shenanigans, each following about a year after the previous book.

My thoughts

I had fully intended on reading this entire series over the holidays in December, but thanks to LIFE I didn’t start this series until the middle of December and wrapped it up in early January. But with each book only being about 250 pages, it’s easy to speed through all four of them. The Winter Series was a fun holiday read. I’m a sucker for dysfunctional families AND especially dysfunctional families at Christmas. Most of us have our own dysfunction to contend with over the holidays, so it’s always nice to focus on a fictional family to distract us from our own. 😉

There was plenty of dysfunction within the Quinn family to keep me entertained. Who hasn’t wanted to run an inn or bed and breakfast?? At least in their wildest fantasies. Kelley Quinn, the patriarch of the family has been running the Winter Street Inn for about twenty years with his second wife, Mitzi, and while he thought things were chugging along pretty smoothly–okay, maybe he became too complacent–his life gets turned upside down when he discovers Mitzi and their December guest “Santa” doing more than kissing under the mistletoe.

Meanwhile, Kelley’s oldest three children with his first wife, Margaret, have their own problems to deal with, and Kelley and Mitzi’s only child, Bart, has just been deployed to Afghanistan. While Kelley and Mitzi’s world is imploding, it falls on Margaret to step up and lead her family through this tumultuous holiday.

I enjoyed each character and their storylines. While sometimes their decisions drove me crazy, it reflected the reality of life with uncontrollable family members. While these books were fun and festive, they also focused on some very serious subject matters, especially the final book, Winter Solstice.

My Rating:

Have you read any of the Winter Series? What did you think? Let me know in the comments!

Happy Wandering!