(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Reach)
There’s something about the most wonderful time of the year that makes us feel as if anything is possible, that all the baggage of the year can be wiped away in the effervescent glittery escapism of Christmas.
While the new year is traditionally the time for resolutions and declarations, the reality is that Christmas feels more like a place where these new moments can begin, full as it is of goodwill and cheer and a sense that while the everyday may be leaden with mistakes of the past and issues aplenty, that the festive season is somehow immune, that all that celebratory fabulousness is a better setting for changes to be made and epiphanies, such as they are outside religious stories and fairytales, to acted on.
That certainly seems to be the warm and cosy vibe in The Christmas Book Club by Sarah Morgan which brings three close friends, Erica, Claudia and Anna, of whom of whom are at 40 or nearing the milestone birthday, together at a beautifully romantic Vermont inn where their book club is meeting after events made their usual summer get-together all but impossible.
All of them have issues percolating away as they arrive at the inn, most notably Erica who seems uncharacteristically distracted as as check into the inn where widowed 28-year-old owner, Hattie, seems to have rattled the high-powered corporate woman who rarely lets anything faze her or distract her from the task at hand.
Anything to get out of here and clear her [Erica’s] head. She didn’t like this version of herself. This unsure, shaken, indecisive version. She needed a dose of normal, and visiting a bookstore with her friends sounded suitably normal. It was a tradition when they met up for their book club. They always spent a few happy hours browsing and buying.
Erica’s unusual loss of focus and resolve is quickly noticed by Anna, who’s fretting about what she’ll do when her kids Daniel and Meg head off to college, and Claudia, who between jobs and relationships and freaked out by her ill-defined and uncertain future, but they know better than to prod their friend who will usually spill about what’s on her mind when she’s ready.
She’s not the only one consumed by life’s less stellar issues.
Hattie, two years out from the death of her beloved husband Brent is struggling to know where she should take the inn next – it was Brent’s ideas that drove the inn’s existence and Hattie is still to lost in grief to see the validity of putting her own ideas into action – and with five-year-old prodigiously clever and articulate daughter Delphi to raise alone, she’s wondering if she has the energy to do what needs to be done to keep the inn afloat.
By any measure, each of the four main characters have a lot to contend with and while, as is common with books in the Christmas redemption genre, there’s a better than even chance everything will work out for everyone, Morgan doesn’t pretend for a second that the journey to happy-ever-after will be an easy one.
There are serious issues and substantial emotions at play in The Christmas Book Club and Morgan makes abundantly sure that each character’s path to some sort of resolution feels measured and real and honest about the realities of the human experience.
(courtesy official author site)
After all, while it’s lovely to have bright and sparkly festive fixes to things, and we read these books because they speak to the buoyant wish and hope we all have for life to be made better simply by the fact that it’s Christmas, they only really mean something because each of the characters have gone through the wringer, much as we all do.
With that kind of weighty humanity driving the narrative, all the talk of the romanticism of the inn and the magical beauty of its settings, food and overall ambiance (not to mention the book’s love letter to reading and bookstores) suddenly feels as real and tangible as any of the dark and terrible things stalking the four women.
Throughout the loveliness of The Christmas Book Club, Morgan takes us on a fulfilling journey through the darkness and light of the human soul, and how even those people with everything seemingly together can benefit from some seasonal miracles, or at least, the aura of being enveloped in Christmas which doesn’t fix things in and of itself but makes you feel as if they are solvable, and let’s face it, that’s half the battle won.
The joy of this novel is really how time away from the everyday, especially in a festively escapist setting, can reset your thinking, your perspective and your willingness to make decisions on where to head to next because you’re not weighed down by all the usual ennui that makes any kind of change seem far off and impossible.
‘And if he kisses you,’ Claudia said, ‘you are going to kiss him right back. I bet that man is a seriously good kisser.’
This time Hattie said nothing. She already knew he was a seriously good kisser, but that wasn’t something she was willing to share. Some feelings were hers and hers alone.
But maybe instead of hiding from what happened, it was time to address it.
Hattie is not immune to that dynamic.
She may live at the inn but it is her everyday, lovely though it is, and it takes to usual paradigm busting presence of Erica, Anna and Claudia to get Hattie looking at the world around her differently, and to ask herself whether there’s a wholly different way to approach running the inn and whether she’s ready to move on to new love with the handsome and selflessly charming Noah from the farm next door.
If you feel trapped in where you are and nothing seems to be shifting the clay feet of your life, then reading The Christmas Book Club might just be the wake-up call you need.
Detractors of this genre decry them as light and frothy and insubstantial but that kind of attacking line ignores the fact that novels like this have some real emotional weight and heft and that while writers like Morgan do give you a soul-restoring happy ending, it always comes after each and every character has had to face and endure a stark nighttime of the soul.
No one gets anything for nothing, and that’s as true in a book like The Christmas Book Club as it in real life; the key difference here, and lordy after a tough and taxing year it’s good to read the happiness inherent in this kind of novel, is that they do get a happy-ever-after, its suffused and drenched in the magic of the Christmas season and it reminds us that while life can drag us down, it can pick us up and all we have to do is to be when for that tinsel-bedecked upswing when it happens.