(courtesy Sourcebooks Casablanca)
From the gloriously mischievous play on the lyrics of an old Christmas favourite to the phrase adorning its back cover in Australia (or the front in this artwork) where Santa and “Joy to the World” get short shrift, You’re a Mean One, Matthew Prince by Timothy Janovsky, is all into Christmas.
Or if you are the titular grossly disaffected, thoroughly spoiled, fashion-obsessed rich boy protagonist of the piece, not very much at all; even so, wherever you go into this delightful festive rom-com, Christmas is everywhere (or even “all around you?” No, wait, that’s love from the theme song of a cinematic stalwart of the season) with the novel all about whether the most transformative time of the year, or says Dickens and countless others, can have any effect on someone so committed to grinching their way through life.
Granted not the most original of narrative drivers but it’s what You’re a Mean One, Matthew Prince does with this Christmas constant of festive redemption and rebirth, all with a beautifully liberating queer twist, that makes it one of the better rom-com novels in what is now a very crowded genre field.
In fact, if you are to go searching with reckless abandon in a bookstore or online, you will fast discover that having your wretched self changed for the better and falling in love, for one must surely accompany the other just as tree must be trimmed with glittery decorations aplenty, is really the one storyline game in town when it comes to Christmas.
I Should Be Home for the Holidays Hoedown, I remind myself.
Chaps. Square dancing. Bourbon. Breathe. Breathe, dammit. Gingham tablecloths. Sliding barn doors. Horse-drawn carriage rides. Exhale, exhale, exhale …
When the campy scene colors itself al the way to the edges, I reopen my eyes, but don’t find relief. F**k.
Summoning my last nerve, I ring the high-pitched bell and prepare myself for what lies beyond the threshold.
The purists among us would argue that this wave of festive reinvention started with the birth of Jesus but for most people, it’s A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens which not only seismically changed the face of a then very lacklustre celebration of Christmas, but also advanced the compellingly likeable idea that it’s the perfect time of year, removed as it is from the crushing ordinariness of the day-to-day, for lives to be magically altered and worlds to be transformed in ways that will last well beyond the day itself.
Janovsky runs with this trope and very much makes it his dialogue-sparkling own, giving us an heir to a finance/writing empire wrought by his parents, who has – OOPS! – just impulsively bought an island on which to hold a banner festival because nothing says responsible, in his money and social media influencer brain like randomly buying the sorts of things of which normal folks can just dream.
While Matthew thinks this is a bang-up idea, guaranteed to prove he is Responsible, his parents, one of whom, his mother, is not a native New Yorker but an escapee from a small New England town, and banish him to Wind River where his grandmother and grandfather, long abandoned by their ambitious daughter who makes it clear she has no love for the town that moulded her, are supposed to turn his life around.
(courtesy official author site / (c) Rebecca Phillips Photography)
Matthew, being the truculent protagonist, angry at everyone and everything, is having none of it, least of all the fact that the town, which is struggling somewhat and is counting on the annual Christmas Charity Gala to give the locale’s ailing retail establishments a much-needed shot in the arm, and determines he will do what he has to do, including reluctantly agreeing to organise this critical event, to get back home to his vapid, man-hungry A-list, media-attracting fabulously gay life in New York.
The only one who could cruel these plans?
Why one Mr. Hector Martinez, an attractive guy who’s staying with Matthew Prince’s grandparents, who are feisty in their absolute loveliness, and with whom Matthew clashes pretty much from the word go.
Which means, of course, they are destined to fall in love and live happily ever after, with Matthew a wholly changed man, but before that happens You’re a Mean One, Matthew Prince has a huge amount of fun with its lead who undergoes all of the indignities needed to prove that maybe life in a small town isn’t so much, that maybe Christmas can be a good thing and somewhere under the Givenchy metallic jeans and the flouncing attitude is the garrulously happy little boy who used to delight his grandparents.
We all know he’s definitely in there somewhere and Janovsky has a huge amount of emotionally resonant fun taking Matthew through the many key moments that will reshape and redefine his hitherto his festively undefined life.
With the music blasting and my heart racing, his lips part, allowing my tongue to slip inside and taste the salty sweetness of his mouth. It’s like we’re trying desperately to merge on the molecular level, any space between us wasted. His five-o’clock shadow is soft from beard oil underneath my touch. My stomach swoops.
‘Just as good as the last ones?’ he asks of the kiss, pulling back and searching my face for confirmation.
I shake my head. ‘Better.’
There may be no real new ideas under the Christmas sun, or should that be tree, but You’re a Mean One, Matthew Prince takes the existing tropes and makes merry (totally meant that) with them, delivering up a festive rom-com novel that is zingy, smartly written, sigh-worthy both romantically and in the spirit of the season sense and bursting with zippy, clever dialogue and characters who don’t get swallowed by the well-flagged finish line but rise appealingly above it.
The author happily manages to be both a welcome captive of the redemptive drivers of the season, with queer romance, and not just for Matthew, front and centre, and to make it very much his own in ways that will have you happy you gave this novel a go.
In fact, you reach the end of it, happy not just at the ending which is wonderful but at the journey to get there which is far more emotionally weighty and substantive than you might expect – for one, our initially calloused and angry protagonist is struggling with anxiety issues which are only treated sensitively and with respect but which leaven his caustic front with an appealingly honest vulnerability – with Matthew not so much zapped by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, though they make a pleasingly oblique appearance as forced to do some real existential deep digging and changing.
It’s a joy that sticks around because the way Matthew changes is just as important as the fact that he does, and you love the idea of someone finding a sense of true self, love, connection and belonging with his actual family, his found family and with a season he previously treated with the contempt meted out to someone wearing last season’s fashions.
You’re a Mean One, Matthew Prince is sweetly charming slice of festive rom-com redemption, with added emotional grunt, which will steal your heart, delight your mind and remind that while getting presents and singing carols on Christmas eve is rather lovely, sometimes getting your soul changed too is the best gift you’ll ever get and one that will last well beyond a wholly transformed season.