As Duck the Halls by Donna Andrews opens, the New Life Baptist Church has been skunked! With just a week to go before Christmas, the night before the New Life Baptist Choir’s famous Christmas concert someone has left a cage of a dozen skunks in the choir loft. With the largest church in Caerphilly unusable for the next several days, all the churches in town jump in to help by offering their facilities. As the most organized person in town, Meg gets enlisted to plan the schedule of where each church’s activities can be moved. During her time at her own church, Trinity Episcopal, which is hosting the Christmas concert two nights in a row, since Trinity is smaller than New Life, Meg has to deal with the angry and violent choir director, Jerome Whitefoot. This man even dislocates Meg’s shoulder in crashing into her in his anger. Further, there is the resident gadfly, Barloman Vess, whose dearest wish is to catch someone committing fraud or waste at the church.
The next night Saint Byblig’s, the Catholic church, gets hit with several hundred ducks, and the following night someone sets fire to the undercroft, a.k.a. the basement, at Trinity Episcopal. But this time the firefighters find a body in the undercroft. It is that of Vess. Did the skunkers escalate to murder? Meg gets involved in solving the case as she busily deals with the schedule changes. Plus she has her four- year- old twin boys, Jamie and Josh, who are excited about all the Christmas events.
Duck the Halls is one of my favorite books in the Meg Langslow series. I appreciate the way the people of Caerphilly do everything they can to support each other and keep the churches going through a show of ecumenicalism. Even when it is not their church that has been hit, all the residents team up to restore things in the targeted churches and offer their own for services that can’t be held. I found the plot to be of real interest, with creative touches that make the story exciting.
This book is also fun because we get to see so many old friends, and each character has a strong personality. We feel that we might run into them in real life and know them instantly. Each one is highly unique, giving us a strong sense of the fun characters. It is also fun to see Meg as she looks through all her Christmas cards and reminisces about each of her old friends. My one complaint is the fact that Andrews treats four-year-old Josh and Jamie more like toddlers than preschoolers. They don’t even speak yet in sentences much of the time. “G’amma come?” is but one example of such speech. They even use a playpen, something they’d have grown out of long ago.
Bernadette Dunne performs the audio edition of this book and makes it very lively. Her character voices are each unique, sounding so much as I would imagine each might sound. She clearly has done her homework in studying the characters to create voices for each. Her expression is effective and her timing excellent. I can’t even imagine reading this book without hearing Dunne’s characterizations of each person.
I thoroughly enjoy Duck the Halls and have listened to the book many times when I’ve needed a smile. The book has lots of humor and a great story. I also appreciate that the book focuses on the true meaning of Christmas, the birth of Jesus, instead of the fictional Santa Claus. This just adds to the enjoyment I get from this book. I give the book five stars.
To purchase this book for yourself, click here on Amazon.
