If you are aficionado of festive romcoms – and if not, why not, and what did the Grinch do to your cold, dead, tinsel-starved heart? – you will be well aware that they’re all about future love.
Two would-be lovers who don’t know they needed to fall in love, or are actively trying not to, are taken back and forth through will-they, won’t-they scenarios, all dripping with Christmassy bonhomie and bling, before finally discovering that their best Christmas gift is each other.
Cue the swoons and sighs and general gasps of happiness.
In A Cozy Kind of Christmas by Ellie Alexander, the romances are mostly well and truly done dusted, though they are, for the purposes of narrative robustness and zest, not exactly in sparkling shape or in their final form just yet.
It’s an intriguing way of telling a love story, based on the assumption that simply because there is some attachment to someone beyond the cursory doesn’t mean that love has yet taken its final form.
And so it is with Meg and Matt, Johanna and Connor, and Owen and Jill – they might be connected, even deeply in love or love or lingering post-romance friendship, but are they really where they need to end up?
They are not, and much of the deftly told enjoyment of A Cozy Kind of Christmas, which has some fun with its central narrative conceit, is the creative way Alexander gets the characters to the inevitable happy-ever-after.
She [Meg] was going to see Matt again.
In Bend!
Break out the big band Christmas carols.
Was this a mistake?
But what other choice did she have? Her job was on the line, and rent was due soon.
What’s the worst thing that could happen?
Ha! Famous last words.
Probably the characters with the hardest road to romance are Meg and Matt, long-time friends and romantic exes who haven’t talked in a year after an attempt by Matt to encourage Meg to take a particular course of action went south fast.
Helping their now-separated lives is the fact that Matt lives in Ben, Oregon with new girlfriend (!!!) and local heiress Lucinda, who is annoyingly lovely while Meg maintains a soaring career one of a gifted lead reporter with ESPN in New York.
Meg misses Matt and vice versa but she’s not about to admit that out loud, and if it were not for the fact that Matt is about to turn 30 and is having a huge party thrown for him by Lucinda in the same town (good old Bend, Oregon) where Meg and her friend/boss Johanna have an assignment to cover the sport of snocross, they likely would never have crossed paths again.
But fairly quickly in A Cozy Kind of Christmas it’s clearly established that they will see each other again, cueing all kinds of awkwardness, second thoughts, revisited emotions and a sense that maybe what looks very final is not that final at all.
In other words, all evidence to the contrary, Meg and Matt may yet reconnect, re-establish their once buoyant, close friendship and finally and absolutely fall in love.
The delightful part of A Cozy Kind of Christmas, and this holds true for all three of the romances, is that even though you know it’s all going to end in smiles and kisses, Alexander really makes them for their happy-ever-afters.
(courtesy official Ellie Alexander Facebook)
That very much holds for Johanna, a high-powered executive who runs the division in which Meg works who keeps hooking up with star ESPN anchor Connor for what she thinks are no-strings-attached fun.
There’s a danger to flaunting HR conventions but she can’t help herself, her only consolation being that there’s nothing serious between them, and besides, it’s highly possible Connor is scheming to take her job so why would you want a relationship with someone like that?
Of course, none of that’s true and there’s something very real possibly happening between them but Johanna cannot accept that and it takes all kinds of determined work on Connor’s part to convince that maybe there’s true love lurking amongst all the lighthearted catch-ups and rampant self deception.
The final couple in Cupid’s firing line are very much #CouplesGoals but Jill has reached a point after seven years with her hunky artist partner Owen where she wants something more traditional, something she thinks Owen will not remotely be in favour of.
But what if she’s wrong?
I mean, naturally she is, and there’s a great deal of happiness waiting to follow all the angst and fears about them breaking up (Jill’s fears, not Owen’s) but again, Alexander rather nicely stretches things out, sometimes with a tad too much narrative convenience (to be fair, that is a festive romcom’s stock in trade) and you arrive at the finish line with these Jill and Owen happy they have found their unique kind of happy-ever-after.
The whole room pulsed with happy energy–clinking glasses and laughter.
Meg felt like she’d stepped into a real-life snow globe.
Everything was flawless.
Perfect.
Magical.
Just right for a winter wonderland proposal.
The stars of the show are really Meg and Matt and honestly they are so adorable that you want them to get back together pretty much as soon as they end up on the same pages together.
A Cozy Kind of Christmas does a lovely job with sparkling dialogue and a deft hand that makes all the characters feel very much like the close friends they are, to give the story a delightful sense of hope and possibility.
Christmas references are sprinkled liberally about, and while the novel isn’t directly Christmas-focused, with the birthday celebrations dominating proceedings, the fact that it takes place then really adds some delightful romantic atmospherics to a novel already frothily rich in them.
What really sets A Cozy Kind of Christmas apart is that it is right there in the trenches with love that was and might yet be again (Meg and Matt), love that is and may not be for long but who knows (Jill and Owen) and is there even if no one can see it (Connor and Johanna); it’s not like we’re waiting for it to happen, it is happening, the only big question is what form it will eventually take, especially when for all these would-be couples, it seems initially to be on life support.
Knowing love is in the offing and watching it realise its true potential is always lots of heartwarming, escapist fun and A Cozy Kind of Christmas absolutely delivers, serving up a joyously fun and emotionally ground festive round of what love might look like if only those close to finding it could get out of their own way.