Winter Solstice: Short Stories from the Worlds of KP Novels

I wonder if you've heard of Kindle Scout before. It's this program where you can read an exerpt of a book and then vote for it (up to 3 books at a time). At the end of the campaign, the Kindle Scout staff will review the book and decide whether to publish it or not. I've actually voted for a few, then I realised that my Amazon account wouldn't let me download them because I was voting with a non-Japan store (same email though, so that's weird). Finally, though, I managed to read it using the cloud reader and that brings me to this novel - short stories from various Kindle Scout winners. All the stories are related to the world, and hopefully I'll find a few that I like and that I voted for (and thus received a free copy.

There are several categories involved in this, so let me go through them one by one:

Romance - I'm not really on a romance kick now, but I thought they were pretty good. Out of the three stories, I liked "Coconutty Christmas: Holiday in Hawaii", which was a fun look at what happens when a staff member of a Hawaiian resort gets attracted to one of the guests (and vice versa)

Sci-Fi, Fantasy, & Horror - I thought the stories here were really strong, but that's probably because I've always like these genres. I liked all three, but my vote for this category would be for Awash in Christmas Spirit, which is about Beth, a 15 year old who can heal people. Kind of sadly, I didn't vote for this so I don't have a copy to read.

Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense - This was the most uneven category for me (and the one with 6 stories, twice the number of the previous two). Some stories were great, while I just wasn't feeling a few of the stories - there were some passages where I felt like information was being recapped. I really liked Killing Anna, which had a really great twist that left me questioning who the real killer was. The book it's related to is Random Acts of Unkindness, which I actually voted for and have! Quite excited to read that! All I Want for Christmas was pretty good too, and I liked how the story moved (and the fact that it had a happy ending! If it's a Christmas story or has Christmas in the title, I kinda want it to have a happy ending).

Literary Fiction - There was only one story here, and I wasn't really feeling it, but I'm picky when it comes to literary fiction anyway.

Overall, this is a pretty good collection to get if you've got a bunch of books and you don't know what to read first. The stories should be pretty representative of the author, and I'm hoping that if I like the short story, I'll enjoy the novel too. After all, I did like the first few chapters enough to vote for it.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a free and honest review.