~Mr Dickens and His Carol Samantha Silva A truly joyous Christmas novel which perfectly encapsulates Dickens and his Victorian England. This is a fictional account of how Dickens came to write one of his most famous and beloved stories. When Martin Chuzzlewit is a supreme flop, Dickens must face the fact that his financial status is looking bleak. He is told by his publisher that he must write a Christmas story within the next few weeks to save himself from ruin. Meanwhile his wife is planning their annual lavish Christmas party and his kids are tugging on his coat sleeves asking to be taken to the toy store to pick out their Christmas presents.
Feeling decidedly bah-humbugish with all of this stress, he becomes fractious and irritable. His wife will have none of it and absconds to Scotland with their five children, leaving Dickens to wander the cobbled streets of London, desperately trying to pull his Christmas story out of the cold and foggy air. When he visits a friend at the local theatre Dickens has a chance encounter with Eleanor Lovejoy who becomes something of a muse for the next few weeks and who offers him a quiet respite from his troubles.
Meanwhile, someone plagiarizes his work, he’s sued for character defamation and his father’s reckless spending leads him to take an ad out in the paper declaring himself not responsible for his father’s debts. Oh, the craziness of the Christmas season.
It’s a beautifully written tale which takes facts from his life (Martin Chuzzlewit was indeed a flop) and weaves a charming and magical story which mimics the real A Christmas Carol (Eleanor has a tiny son named Timothy) and sprinkles it with a heavy dose of It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s chock full of cheeky little winks to Dickens, “mine is a bleak house” and “the children look at me with great expectations” and there’s even a little bit of a ghost story thrown in. Because, how could there not be?
A wonderfully festive read full of love and forgiveness which might (might) just fill you up with enough Christmas cheer to get you through those family dinners.
~Seven Days of Us Francesca Hornak Olivia Birch is a doctor who has been in Liberia dealing with the outbreak of a deadly disease and must now, upon her return to England, stay in quarantine for a week. It’s Christmas, so she chooses to do it at her family home with the family she hasn’t seen in quite some time – especially not during the holidays.
For seven days, starting December 23rd, Olivia will be confined to the family seat along with her mother Emma, father Andrew and sister Phoebe. This is a story of family dynamics and the past rising up to meet the future, so of course there is drama aplenty. Emma harbours a secret health issue which she would like to keep under wraps until after Christmas. Sister Phoebe, newly engaged, is constantly whittering on about her impending nuptials with an overabundance of charming frivolity. Olivia, meanwhile, finds it all ridiculously superficial and struggles to blend all of this with her own experience of having lived in a war torn country. But Olivia has a secret of her own – a forbidden relationship with an Irish doctor.
Living on top of each other for a week, of course, has a way of forcing secrets to bubble to the surface and spill over into the cold light of day where they must be confronted. As it turns out it’s Dad, Andrew, who has the biggest secret of all, a son, who comes tumbling through their front door two days after Christmas, upending the family applecart and forcing everyone to rethink a few things.
Assuming this storyline won’t collide with your own family Christmastime drama, this is a nicely written story. It does touch on some rather sad storylines yet it is neither too deep nor too heavy for a holiday read. It manages to maintain a pretty upbeat persona and is full of dry, English, self-deprecating humour, if you’re a fan of such a thing.
~One Day in December Josie Silver On a dreary December London day, Laurie is on a crowded bus headed home from work when she makes eye contact with Jack who is waiting at the bus stop. In that brief moment sparks fly, a connection is made and the world realigns itself for Laurie who proceeds to spend the next year looking for Jack, to no avail. Until one day he shows up…on the arm of her best friend. Oh dear, it turns out Jack is the guy that her closest friend, Sarah, has been going on about for weeks. So what do Jack and Laurie do? Say absolutely nothing.
The book follows the two over the course of the next decade, told alternately between the point of view of both Jack and Laurie as they navigate their relationship with each other and Sarah as well as life in general with all its ups and downs and twists and turns.
It’s a charming tale of love and friendship and missed opportunities. I’m not much for a romance novel myself but this is nicely written and it’s hard not to get caught up in such an engaging story. My only gripe is that at eight pages short of four hundred pages long, I think a good hundred pages or so could have been lopped off. I did find myself skim reading a few parts which felt a bit repetitive in the back and forth musings of Laurie and Jack but it has an authenticity which helps elevate it above your typical romance novel. And for a book essentially about the importance of timing, slotting this heartwarming read into the magical month of December is good timing indeed.
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