(courtesy Storm Publishing)
When you dive into as many romcoms, festive or otherwise, as this reviewer does, it doesn’t take too long to spot novels which have that extra special something.
Maybe it’s dialogue that sounds like it might bounce out of the mouths of actual living breathing human beings (albeit ones with the magical ability to have the right thing to say at exactly the right time). Or characters who feel like people you would actually like to meet and then be with for the duration. Or story which starts intriguingly pivoting on a cleverly creative premise and which then executes on it with surety and flawless fun and some necessarily heartfelt emotion.
Or maybe, such as mischievously titled Big Nick Energy by Kristen Bailey, it has all three, and then some, the sort of festive romcom that feels so alive and vivaciously immersive that you want to stay in its world forever, and you’re disappointed when the story comes to a perfectly formed end.
The last of this year’s Christmas in July reads, Big Nick Energy was judged initially on its title alone.
Don’t get me wrong; the premise of a woman named Kay who ends up accidentally dating two men named Nick at once and has to figure out, with the help of her free-spirited BFF Lucy, who really has her heart was clearly appealing enough for the book to make the challenging journey from shelf to actually bought and read book.
‘And then there’s also New Nick in the picture, dressed in red with the chiselled looks and the nonchalance, and he makes you a little twitchy in your lady bits so you don’t know what’s going on …’ she [Lucy] says again. Again, a little too astutely.
‘Twitchy in my lady bits?’ I [Kay] say, giggling.
‘Don’t deny these things. Is he definitely not an option then?’ she asks.
‘I just think I can only do one man at a time. Any more feels … tiring …’
But the title, rightly or wrongly, and quite wrongly as it turned out, turned out, like the rest of this brilliantly inspired festive romcom, to be the work of someone who likes to have fun with the genre while perfectly realising its rich, character-full potential.
Big Nick Energy ticks all the romcom boxes, right down to the complicated situation of a kindhearted, book drive-organising, grandmother-devoted young librarian named Kay who bumps into her ex of eight years, now a high-flying financier, and decides, with understandable caution, to give him another chance.
The odds of them meeting at all in the middle of the crushing busyness of a London festive season is a miracle, and the fact that it takes places at a Christmas market while Kay is shopping for gifts, surely has to mean something, right?
Maybe, but shortly after this impossibly meet-cute second chance, Kay meets the other Nick aka New Nick, a quieter but devastatingly handsome man whose family run a Christmas tree farm, who has a kind and giving heart once you peel the gruffness away, and who still likes and helps her even after she ends up tangled up one night in a tree-netting machine.
He gets her pulse racing in a way that Old Nick, as he comes to be known, but how can she walk away from the chance to find love with the man who once dumped her spectacularly publicly (that scene alone is worth cracking the book open for, a brilliant mix of the fiendishly funny and the sadly heartfelt) and who seems to be a whole new person?
(courtesy Storm Publishing)
It’s a conundrum of the heart all right, and one which Bailey employed to brilliantly good effect right throughout Big Nick Energy which may have many of the genre hallmarks of a typical romcom but which gives them such fresh, vital, funny and thoughtfully emotional life, that you turn page after page, grateful to be part of a story that sparkles, and shimmers and dances with both the festivity of the season and the richness of new and possible love.
What becomes immediately apparent, near instantly, is how richly delightful a protagonist Kay is.
She’s funny, sweet, kind, talented, competent, a children’s book author on the rise who always has time for her feistily lovely grandmother who has mild dementia and who has no issue dressing up in whatever costume is needed to bring cheer to whichever group, whether it’s school kids or nursing home residents, she is in contact with at the time.
She’s the total loveable package and she’s emotionally and otherwise intelligent too, with Bailey sparing her the awful final act poor decision-making which may be a hallmark of many a romcom but which often guts and sullies otherwise richly formed characters.
Without giving too much away, Kay emerges from the final act of Big Nick Energy with her character intact and her personhood unsullied and it makes for a far more pleasing romcom which never once feels like it is failing to stick its flawlessly executed landing.
‘Nick …’ I [Kay] whisper, emotion soaring wildly through me.
‘I [New Nick] like how mildly ridiculous you are. I like how your wild red hair looks like it belongs on a Disney character, I like that you laugh at your own jokes, I like how you eat and it ends up everywhere instead of inside your mouth. I like you. All of you. I need to say that out loud.
‘Please …’
In fact, one of the great many delights of Big Nick Energy is that it keeps the tension heartily resident in Kay’s complicatedly festive love life perfectly taut, and you never once feel like the novel is simply treading narrative water until the reveal of who Kay is going to pick to have her heart long-term.
Speaking of which, you know, pretty much from the start, who Kay is going to pick, but Bailey is such a skilled practitioner of the genre that even knowing that, you find yourself rising and falling with the amusing heartbeats of a beautifully told story.
It’s testament to the author’s way with words that even when so many of the usual tropes and cliches are appealingly in place that you still feel like Big Nick Energy is something richly unique and When Harry Met Sally next level-ish.
It has a Nora Ephron-ish shine and vivacity, from its robustly funny and thoughtful dialogue through to the appeal of its two leading men and its independently minded, charming protagonist to the way they all interact so flawlessly well, and that places it a cut well above the rest from start to finish.
Big Nick Energy is one of those romcoms that make you happy to be alive, which doesn’t feel like another same-old, same-old race around the romantic block, but which rather has real zest and fun and most importantly, an escapist sense of fun which is somehow also grounded in the real world.
That matters because while we know books like Big Nick Energy are all fluff and reality-diverting nonsense in one sense (not a criticism; that’s one thing I ADORE about them), we want them to mean something and to feel like they could happen in the real world, something this novel does with hugely appealing and involving aplomb and which persists long after you have reluctantly read the last page.