Mainlining Christmas

Book Review: The Merriest Misters Timothy Janovsky, 2024 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. This romantic spin on The Santa Clause makes for some real holiday magic. Premise: Patrick and Quinn met, fell in love, got married, moved into their own house. Everything you're "supposed" to do. But their marriage is cracking under the pressure of family expectations, unspoken resentments, and unfulfilling careers. That's when Patrick unexpectedly gets a most unusual opportunity, and Quinn's along for a wild ride all the way to the North Pole.  Well, the library gods were kind to me and provided this last-minute holiday gift! This might be my favorite Christmas read of the season.  Think The Santa Clause, except instead of a guy killing Santa, becoming Santa, and fixing his relationship with his son, Patrick injures Santa (who unexpectedly quits), becomes Santa, and fixes his relationship with his husband.  Santa is mag...

Book Review: Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret Benjamin Stevenson, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  This is a weird one. It's book three in a series, and I haven't read the others. However, I think the bigger factor here is that this book (and its series) is written in a particular style of extremely meta humor which... isn't for everyone. Ernie Cunningham was a mystery buff before his life turned into Murder, She Wrote. With two solved murders under his belt (and written into the previous books, which exist in the world of the story), he's beginning to get a reputation. Enter - the Christmas Special. (The prologue literally has the narrator say that this is a Christmas special.) It's the lead up to Christmas, and he's traveling to see a magician do a holiday benefit show, because the CEO of the nonprofit the benefit is for was murdered, and Ernie's ex-wife (currently the nonprofit guy's ...

Novella Review: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Julianna Keyes, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  I've been reviewing a bunch of retellings this year, and this very nearly qualifies. It starts with a writer on a Christmas Train, after all.  Only in reality, it's more a funny subversion of Hallmark tropes with a happily-ever-after.  Eve and Will are travel writers, and their boss somehow sent them both to cover Christmas in this special holiday resort town. Whoever writes the best article gets a pending promotion. (This is a set-up that makes no sense. Not because of the promotion, but because you wouldn't write about a special (probably prohibitively expensive) Christmas experience in a travel magazine AFTER the holiday.) The problem is that both Eve and Will are Christmas cynics, but their boss isn't at all. They know she's going to want the schmaltzy, feel-good story, and they both str...

Book Review: You're a Mean One, Matthew Prince Timothy Janovsky, 2022 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, although despite the title, it turned out this story is more inspired by/related to Grinchy themes than a retelling of any kind.   Premise: Matthew can't believe he's spending Christmas in the tiny town his mom grew up in, instead of with his friends in NYC, preparing to throw another epic New Year's Bash for the (other) richest kids in town. But apparently he made one mistake too many and has been banished while PR is spun. Making things worse, he's sharing space at his grandparents' home with a local student who is entirely too self-righteous (not to mention gorgeous).  Okay, I might have an addition to my list of favorite romance authors. (I have enough for a list now! Years ago, I never would have thought it.) This was delightful.  First I want to acknowledge the biggest things that make this story work,...

Book Review: Faking Christmas Kerry Winfrey, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Whether Christmas in Connecticut is a holiday classic is debatable, but it has inspired several adaptations and remakes, including this one.   Premise: Laurel didn't mean to lie to her boss. She just really needed a job, and one misunderstanding spiraled out of control. Now she has to pretend that her sister's life is hers for one memorable Christmas.  You know what? I liked this one!  Laurel is funny and relatable. She's acknowledges that she's made bad decisions and is trying to do better, gets frustrated, wears her heart on her sleeve, and is fundamentally optimistic, despite also being hugely self-deprecating.  The best parts of Christmas in Connecticut (the banter, the humor and the fun characters) are largely intact, while the occasional sexism of the original is left behind. Laurel got her magazine website job that she's t...

Book Review: It's a Fabulous Life Kelly Farmer, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Here's an obvious one.  Premise: It's a Wonderful Life, but cheap-Netflix-remake ready.  I've often been a bit of a cynic when it comes to It's a Wonderful Life, and this book didn't cure me of that.  To me it reads like a romance novel full of very standard modern-romance-movie tropes - Girl lives in small town, but wants to move to the city. Girl's high school crush moves back to town and they reconnect. Both get roped into helping with a town holiday festival. Minor drama as girl can't decide whether to stay in town with first love or strike out for dream life in city. Magic of Christmas makes girl appreciate her life in town and decide to stay with first love. The fact that both girl and first love are female just makes it a modern romance, not an untraditional one.  And actually, that part of it is fine. Sweet,...

Book Review: Just Like Magic Sarah Hogle, 2022 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, and I think I read somewhere that this one was loosely inspired by the Grinch, but it's not a super strong connection.   Premise: Bettie had it all. She lost it all. She accidentally summoned a holiday spirit. Now she's got a one-way ticket back to the life she wants, unless she realizes she wants something else instead. I'll be honest, I almost quit reading this book. I hated Bettie. She was awful. She was useless. She was a self-pitying mess of a person who wasn't ever in any real trouble, despite the terrible decisions she'd made and things she'd done.  She was a mess partly because she'd briefly been a child star, but I didn't have any sympathy, because she was also a washed-up wannabe influencer who was trying to scam her way back into relevance rather than admit to her (extremely wealthy) family she needed help.  The...

Book Review: The Kingdom of Sweets Erika Johansen, 2023 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics, starting with this very different take on the Nutcracker.  Premise: A party. A magical toy from a mysterious man. A trip to a wondrous land of sweets. Plus betrayal, torture, and death. Not a story for kids. So I have to admit that I was annoyed fairly early on in this book because it's a dark fantasy based on the Nutcracker, only it's about Clara's goth sister, and yet her name is NOT Marie. I mean, the idea of there being two girls was right there!  But no, the goth bluestocking sister is called Natasha. Natasha and Clara are twins, but Nat was supposedly cursed at their christening by Drosslemeyer, while Clara was blessed. Clara grew up beautiful and sweet, but a bit vapid, while Nat is spiky and awkward and reads books and learns the servants' names.  I was worried early on that the book would lean too hard in her being ...

Christmas Holiday William Somerset Maugham, 1939 I had been reading a number of brand new holiday books that feel as though the authors hope they'll be turned into movies, so I felt like switching gears to try a much older book that was actually adapted for film. If you read our review of the movie , you may remember that Erin mentioned that a lot of aspects were changed in the adaptation. The largest is that in the movie, the main female character gets the most emotional development, and her story, told mostly in flashback to the ostensible point-of-view lead, gets the most screen time.  The novel, on the other hand, actually has a main character. Charley Mason is not an American GI with anger issues, but a British dilettante. His wealthy parents have pretensions of being knowledgeable about art, and at one time he wanted to be an artist himself. At the time of the novel, he's been talked out of that, and instead, he has been preparing to take over his father's safe, sensi...

The Matzah Ball Jean Meltzer, 2021 To start with, the premise of this book has a lot of holes in it. Rachel grew up in a close-knit Jewish community, but she secretly loves all the trappings of Christmas, and is, in fact, secretly a highly successful Christmas romance author. Her childhood frenemy-turned-love-turned-enemy Jacob is now a wealthy entrepreneur who throws expensive events for a living, and he's going to be back in town to manage the biggest Hannukah event ever. Rachel's publishers want her to be more "authentic" and ask her to write a Hannukah romance. She despairs because "there's nothing magic about Hannukah" but decides the only way to get the inspiration she needs is to get to that sold-out party. Cue misunderstandings, arguments, romantic tension, etc. Just two of the questions this raises: 1) some Jewish folks care an awful lot about not giving in to the red-and-green juggernaut called American culture in December, and some don't. ...

Three Holidays and a Wedding Uzma Jalaluddin and Marissa Stapley, 2023 New Release! A copy of this book was provided by Netgalley for the purpose of review.  I joke sometimes about how modern romance novels of a certain type are more movie pitches than books. This one definitely started out that way, but by the end, it was at least a corny movie I think I'd enjoy. I guess the authors know what they're doing there, both have had projects optioned for film or TV according to the bios in the back.  In the first chapter, we meet Anna. Anna is ready for her perfect Christmas with her boyfriend's perfect family, she has to be. Otherwise her perfect boyfriend's perfect family won't be happy if everything doesn't go perfectly.  If you guessed that Anna's boyfriend is like a parody of "the guy who is bad for our heroine," you'd be right. But after a whole scene of me wincing at everything he says, he leaves ahead of her because she has to complete a wor...

The Christmas Swap Talia Samuels, 2023 New Release! A copy of this book was provided by Netgalley for the purpose of review.  Margot and Ben are driving to Ben's family home for the holidays. So far, so normal. Except Margot and Ben met through work a week ago and aren't actually dating, but are planning to lie to Ben's family so his parents will stop making him feel bad for being single. The story gets even wackier once Margot starts to actually fall for Ben's sister Ellie. Meanwhile, Ellie can tell something is weird about Margot and Ben's supposed relationship, but she jumps to a lot of downright farcical conclusions.  This new holiday romance was quite good, although not exceptional. The characters do a few very dumb things that cause some painful miscommunications and misunderstandings, and those made me cringe. I've described the premise, and you need to be ready to suspend your disbelief a lot early on to get on board with Margot and Ben's initial pla...

As soon as I heard this existed, I knew it had to be the last version of A Christmas Carol I watched and reviewed for this project. Twelve Hundred Ghosts is, at least in theory, a supercut of more than 400 adaptations, homages, and reimagined spins on a Christmas Carol, arranged and edited by Heath Waterman, who completed the project over a year and a half. So that certainly puts the fifty-some-odd versions I covered here this year to shame. I do want to return to that "supercut" moniker. Strictly speaking, it's not inaccurate, but I don't think it does justice to the experience of watching this. Waterman isn't simply cutting between scores of adaptations across multiple mediums; he's creating a montage that explodes both the original narrative, as well as the incredible breadth of media it's inspired. He uses split screens to combine versions from different eras and styles, he plays audio tracks over incredibly different films, he includes audio plays, re...

Masters in This Hall K.J. Charles, 2022 After watching so many Hallmark movies this year, I was beginning to forget that humans feel any emotion stronger than the desire for a single chaste kiss. Happily, one of my favorite romance authors came to the rescue with a surprise new holiday novella! This is technically part of her Lilywhite Boys series, but it easily stands alone. The series generally features criminals and detectives plotting schemes and romance in late-Victorian era London. In keeping with the theme, the main character in this novella is hotel detective John Garland, recently fired from his job due to a major robbery occurring on his watch. The man he suspects of the crime has been hired to run a grand week-long Christmas party at his wealthy uncle's estate, so John turns up to try to defeat any further skullduggery.  Of course, he is also desperately attracted to the man, but that should be neither here nor there... The story proceeds apace in Charles's best styl...

Revised 2/21/23: The HarperCollins strike is over! A new contract has been ratified, and this belated review is now public. The Afterlife of Holly Chase Cynthia Hand, 2017 How do I describe this book? For starters, I read it as part of this year's Christmas Carol project, and it's both the farthest from the original and the most respectful of it in a certain light. Holly is a spoiled, mean, shallow rich kid at 17, when she's subject to her own three-spirits Christmas haunting. Being a modern teenager instead of an elderly gentleman, she declares the whole thing idiotic and ignores it. Then she's hit by a car and dies. But Holly gets a chance to redeem herself after all, because the Scrooge Project, an odd hybrid of nonprofit corporation and supernatural society, hires a few actual ghosts as part of their team. So Holly becomes the Ghost of Christmas Past. Every year, the team member with foresight picks a Scrooge - someone who is a bad person but could do a lot of good ...

The Last of the Spirits Chris Preistly, 2015 As I continue my dive into Christmas-Carol-adjacent novels, I found this oddity. I guess it's supposed to be for kids? The author seems to specialize in kid's horror, although the books advertised in the back looked like adult novels? For me this one rode an odd line. It's not that it's bad; it just seems so superfluous.   The book invents a young protagonist, Sam. Sam and his younger sister are living on the street in London due to a complex series of catastrophes. One night, Sam is so angered by the idea that some people (Scrooge) have so much when he has so little that he decides he wants to steal from him, or possibly kill him and steal from him.  However, before this can happen, Sam and his sister fall asleep in a nearby graveyard and are accidentally drawn into the world of the spirits, witnessing all of the events of A Christmas Carol. Sam is simultaneously granted his own visions of the past and of the future if he co...

The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Charlie Lovett, 2015 After my first two forays into expansions on A Christmas Carol, I was worried that I would never find something enjoyable that respected the source. Happily, this one was a delight. Set ten years after the events of the original story, this sweet and playful novella takes the form of both a loving parody and a thematic expansion. Scrooge is still the subject of gossip in the street, only now the consensus is that he's taking this whole keeping-Christmas-all-the-year thing a bit too far. He's generous beyond his means, affectionate to a fault, and comes off as more than a bit eccentric, wishing people Merry Christmas in July. I was a bit worried early on that the story would conclude on a wishy-washy moral of moderation in all things. I could not have been more wrong. Instead, Scrooge realizes that as one man, he can only do so much to help the world. So he proposes a scheme to the Christmas Spirits to multiply his ...

Jacob T. Marley R. William Bennett, 2011 After my first attempt at reading a Christmas-Carol-adjacent novel led me to a pile of trash masquerading as a book, I just hoped this one would be better. And it was, at least at first. The first half or so of this book was actually pretty good. It creates a plausible backstory for Marley and his relationship with Scrooge that works with the original, while expanding aspects of it. It occasionally flirts with stylish prose without trying too hard. This Scrooge and Marley choose to act greedily within the letter of the law (unlike the mess in the other book), showing that the law is not enough when you don't care about anything but wealth and your own advancement - capitalism without human kindness leads only to exploitation, loneliness, and misery. So far, so good. And if it had ended, as the other book did, with Marley's death, I could give it a cautious recommendation: not a great book or anything brilliant, but a nice little piece of...

Marley: A Novel Jon Clinch, 2019 Well, that was a waste of time and energy. This book, obviously, purports to be a backstory for A Christmas Carol . However, it fails on every level. The writing itself is fine for a modern historical novel, but it only occasionally makes a half-hearted attempt at the kind of clever prose that characterizes Dickens' work. The story is a ridiculous mess. It doesn't match up with any of the character relationships as presented in A Christmas Carol, and, in fact, attempts to undermine the very heart of the story. In this novel, Marley is portrayed as a lifelong villain through and through. He is already a liar, extortionist, and forger by the time he meets Scrooge as a child. (Where he picked any of this up is not explained.) His sins only grow from there, including using shell companies to continue to profit from slavery after it is made illegal, extorting favors and money from prostitutes, and paying for the murder of his enemies. He softens a li...

A Christmas Carol (revisited) Charles Dickens, 1843 In preparation for reading and watching a bunch of things related to A Christmas Carol, I thought I should first refresh my memory of the original.  It continues to be a delight. Looking back, I am somewhat appalled by my casual dismissal of its brilliance in this blog's first year ; I heartily regret that.  When I read it this time, what most delighted me were little details, turns of phrase, and metaphors that I'd either forgotten, overlooked, or not bothered to examine in depth during previous readings. So I thought I'd share a few of those with you now. In the Preface, Dickens makes a pun about his ghost story containing the "Ghost of an idea" and hopes that it might "haunt" the readers "pleasantly, and no one choose to lay it." What a cute and playful way to say: this book has a point; it should bother you; don't ignore it. I'm a sucker for an amusing Shakespeare reference. ...