Christmas miracles are the stock in trade of the season.
They pop as regularly as stocking stuffers and garlands of ivy and baubles, and while they might be vanishingly rare in the festive desert known as the rest of the year, they are thick on the decorative ground when Christmas rolls around, proof it is the most wonderful time of the year.
While miracles may come thick and fast in festive lore, one person not expecting one to wrap her up in tinsel and call her “Merry!” is Sage McKnight, a beautiful inside and out architect from the Bay Area in San Francisco, the central character in RaeAnne Thayne’s All is Bright, who has arrived back in her hometown of Hope’s Crossing, Colorado to oversee the completion of a major renovation to a massive mountain home known as Wolf’s Lodge.
Owned by onetime massive baseball start, Mason Tucker, who suffered a significant personal trauma leaving him with significant mobile issues, the lodge represents a new start for the now reclusive man and his nine-year-old daughter Grace who is as bubbly and excited about life as Mason is angry and furiously short about it.
Surely, with two such different people, one of whom is beloved in the town and the daughter of renowned architect Jackson Lange and the other barely known due to his propensity to hide from the world, lost in grief and his career-ending disability, love cannot bloom?
Though she [Sage] was disappointed at Mason Tucker’s response, she couldn’t be too upset. She had an entire month ahead of her to be here, in the place where she loved and with all the people she cared most about in her life.
Ah, but you have not counted on the power of Christmas to change hearts and minds and to make the impossible wonderfully and life-changingly possible.
Exactly as you might hope and expect, the rancour dished out to a well-meaning Sage who runs a charity called Homes For All, which does pro bono home adaptation work for people with mobility issues like Mason (though in his case his fortune earned from pro-baseball has paid for the work carried out on Wolf Ridge), all of funded from videos she does on her YouTube channel showcasing the renovations she’s overseen, soon turns to something far more romantic.
But, of course, neither can suspect the other might harbour any feelings other than that of vendor and client until the very last, crescendo-resonating finale, and so throughout All is Bright there is significant butting of heads (mostly from Mason’s irascible side), brief flirtations, massive emotional retreating and the sort of rom-com to and fro between two people who as far as they are concerned, will never be anything but professional sparring partners.
Set against a snow backdrop of a town that is prosperous and equipped with laudably good facilities and a community spirit par excellence – in keeping with the overall fantasy fairyland of the book, even the town is a miracle of inclusiveness and togetherness that warms the festive soul – All is Bright is a Christmas romance writ large and not just for its two, narrative-dominating central characters.
(courtesy official RaeAnne Thayne Facebook page)
Running in tandem with Sage and Mason’s will-they-won’t story of slow-burning attraction and love, is that is Taryn and Charlie, two best friends from childhood who love each other but can’t even admit because of a traumatic incident a decade or so earlier.
Everyone else can see that theirs is a relationship defined not just by a tenacious and intimate friendship, but but a romantic flame that even great grief and life disruption has not put out.
But there’s something wrong in BFF land as All is Bright and Charlie has arrived back in town and not got in contact with Taryn who has gone from nasty mean girl in her teens to the local middle school’s counsellor who is beloved by students and the town as a whole.
While Sage and Mason take the lion’s share of the rom-com festive fun of All is Bright, you will be wanting to know whether Taryn and Charlie can finally admit to themselves and each other there is love burbling away and that not even self recrimination and a patent lack of self forgiveness can keep them apart.
Thrown into this romantic mix of two would-be couples possibly finding love true love at Christmas – of course they will, but the fun is in the getting there and Thayne does a nice job of keeping the tension in what it is always in rom-com terms a foregone conclusion – are a sprawling cast of supporting characters, including Sage’s vast extended family who have all undergone some pain and heartache but found true happiness in the wondrous surrounds of Hope’s Crossing.
Throughout the rest of the performance, Mason tried to focus on the dancers onstage, but his attention was mostly on the woman beside him.
He was drawn to her in a thousand small ways. How kind she was to his daughter; the light in her eyes when she talked about her passion for architecture; her clear love for her family and community.
Sage as was a difficult woman to resist.
If it all sounds a little sudsy and soapy, that’s precisely what All is Bright is in many ways.
But even though some of the narrative leaps are jaw-droppingly OTT and too neatly tied with a red bow, you go along with it because there’s something about Christmas that makes you want to believe in reality-defying miracles and for happy-ever-after endings to dominate the colder, crueller, sadder parts of life which, anyway, have eleven months of the year to do their spirit-sapping thing.
But this is Christmas, and miracles should happen, and lives should be transformed, and people should fall in love, and Thayne runs with this soul-reviving sensibility, offering romance in a time of hot chocolate and The Nutcracker concerts, and offers a vivacious novel that thoughtfully acknowledges that while life can crush the hope and love and optimism out of you but that it’s also possible, Christmas can put in all back in place again.
It all might seem too good to be true, and maybe it is, but dammit, we want all of that festive unreality and more come Christmas, and the joy of All is Bright is that it serves it up in one festively effervescent package and makes you believe, not just in love again, but in the idea that Christmas can fix what ails you, and not just in basic ways, but in life altering places where you might have given up on change, but life in a time of Christmas hasn’t, and where all the good things in the world await if you can just hold in there and let the festive season work its bright and shiny magic.