(courtesy Penguin Random House)
We love the idea of reinvention.
There’s something immensely appealing about the idea that we’ve made mistakes or decisions that have changed us in some way , or life has strangely twisted us in some way, and that all that damage can be undone.
The idea of all that redemption and renewal is especially attractive at New Year’s when, arbitrary delineation on the calendar or not, we hold fast to the idea that December 31st flipping over to January 1st brings about some magical shift in our fortunes or self.
Tess, the protagonist of New Year’s Kiss by Lee Matthews, isn’t exactly focused on remaking her mid-teen self when she arrives at the family’s luxury resort in Evergreen Vermont; hurting from her parents’ impending divorce, annoyed by the presence of snarky older sister Lauren and not thrilled at the idea of spending a week with her hard-edged grandmother who runs the resort, Tess simply wants to put it all in the rearview mirror and get back to reading and doing her (mostly) loner thing.
She isn’t there to rework her life, to return to the person she used to be before a skateboarding accident at age 10 shut down her life to something far smaller, less scary and more manageable, and she isn’t really interested in leaving the hotel room at any point and certainly not to pursue a ten-point plan of radical reinvention.
So much for telling Lauren all about Christopher, and the butterflies he inspired. And what was all that about Adam Michel? I took a deep breath and huffed it out, staring at the closed curtains across the window, my pulse still racing. I tried to think about Christopher, to reignite that good mood I’d been in, like five minutes ago.
But that last part is precisely what happens when she comes across Christopher in the lobby of the resort’s main building; laid up and in a leg cast thanks to a skiing accident, he’s sweet, charming and funny and one flirty, fun moment leads to another and before she knows it, Tess is making up a list of ten things she’s never done like kissing a stranger, and getting a shorter haircut and eating sushi and vowing to have it all done and dusted by New Year’s Eve.
It’s a radical life for something who has long since retreated into a small “l” life but point by point, her transformational bucket list, and no, she’s not dying as she has to assure some people, begins to change her, to remind her that maybe life has more to offer than bunkering down and trying to survive it, trauma and all.
Much of her new determination is powered by the fact that Christopher seems to like her, really like her, and having a cute, nice guy into her when that sort of thing usually happens to Lauren who falls in love at least once a day, gives a short of confidence and self-belief at a time when life is feeling like it cracking at all its seams.
All Tess sees when she arrives at the resort and is greeted by her grandmother’s list of mandatory activities (groan) are things ending but as list fulfilment gets going, she comes to realise, to her surprise, that maybe she’s not ready to stop living after all.
New Year’s Kiss is, in many ways, light, bright and fun, filled with a shiny exuberance that life can be so much more than you think you’re saddled with and that even when dark and terrible things happen like the end of your parents’ marriage, that maybe good things can not only sneak through but burst upon the landscape of your beleaguered life and change everything.
But even for all that butterflies-in-stomach joyfulness and expectation, New Year’s Kiss is also cognisant of the fact that even new and exciting things don’t suddenly wipe the slate clean.
Were that they did!
Tess has to grapple with the fact that even as she finds herself really liking Christopher and discovering that there’s life in her battered heart after all, that she still has issues aplenty to make life difficult.
Lauren, who has OPINIONS, isn’t easy to deal with, and her grandmother, who’s incredibly stern and not prone to warm washes of grandmotherly emotion, seems set on making her doing a host of things that she has no interest in doing.
She also has her mother calling her repeatedly, even though Tess is angry with her and doesn’t want to even converse on any level, a dad who’ll be gone by the time she gets home to Philly, and the sense that she’s given up a lot of stuff in her life that she doesn’t really want to get back … or does she?
‘Are you guys ready?’ she asked.
Lauren raised her eyebrows at me. I clenched my jaw. My sister was right. Now was the time. And I wasn’t going to let anyone–not Christopher or Damon or anyone–screw its up for me.
‘Yes,’ I said, and snapped my goggles on. ‘Let’s do it.’
What makes the light, frothy YA rom-com fun of New Year’s Kiss so enjoyable to read is that Matthews doesn’t pretend for a second that Tess meeting Christopher is a huge step forward for her.
Yes, it has the potential to radically change her life, and by New Year’s Eve no less, but it’s no silver bullet, and while Tess is excitedly realising that maybe a guy likes her and that maybe holing herself up in her hotel room with her books may not be the sum total of her existence (JOMO-y fun though it is), she’s also struggling with the fact that she is still her and that her life is still a whole lot more complicated than she knows what to do with.
It’s finding her way through all the dark and awful stuff to the really good stuff that fuels this sweet and fun novel and which keeps you turning the pages hoping that the expected ending will indeed materialise even if it looks for all the world that it will not and that Tess may not get to kiss Christopher on New Year’s Eve, after all.
New Year’s Kiss is a lot of rom-com frothy delightfulness but it’s also emotionally weight and alive, buoyant with bouncy, effervescent dialogues, some sage moments some darkness and some real life stuff, all of which come together in a story that, at its hear, believes in possibility, hope and joy and which knows that change is a good and wonderful, if scary thing, and that embarking on something as unusual as a ten-point plan of life changes might just be the best thing you’ve ever done.