(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.)
There is so much power in just being yourself.
This reviewer didn’t see it for years, hemmed in by strident opinions from “those who knew better” in the church and in a slew of other places, and I suspect that the eponymous protagonist of Flora’s Travelling Christmas Shop by Rebecca Raisin doesn’t truly believe it in either; at least, not until someone who loves her unconditionally tells her in the final act that that is why he has fallen in love with her.
It’s a sweet and touching scene but what really elevates it to something really special, and let’s face it, this whole book is something beyond the ordinary festive romcom, is the how validated and seen Flora finally feels when she realises, after a lifetime of being told she’s too much, that she’s really perfectly enough.
It makes the declaration of the man who loves her so much more wondrously powerful because all the things that she’s felt were way beyond the pale like her ardent love of Christmas all year round (which comes with some intensely nostalgic associations), her action-oriented care for others and her willingness to speak her mind where others would stay silent are really just her.
Beautifully, truthfully, delightfully her and finally someone has seen that beyond her bestie Lizzie who is more like a sister and has to love her come what may.
When I think of [Nan], I’m transported back to her aga-warmed kitchen, cocooned by her love, the scent of Christmas spices peppering the air. She’s delight in wrapping presents, sitting at the island bench, while I stirred myriad pots and pans and she waxed lyrical about what she’d bought for whom and why. She mad gift-giving an art form, that woman. And then there’d be the decorating of the cottage on the 1st of December every year.
But the man whom she and Lizzie decide is Flora’s “Hallmark guy”, the man in every Christmas movie who is strong and silent but full of love and just waiting for the right woman to awaken him – Flora’s Travelling Christmas Shop gets wonderfully meta about festive romcoms with Lizzie and Flora’s yardstick for romantic success whether they are hitting certain Hallmark movie trope points – doesn’t have to love her at all and in fact, for much of the opposites attract first act or so, finds her low key annoying.
She is a lot, she knows that, but whereas other guys have tried to tried to change her or simply break up with her to make her more palatable, Connor aka Mr Hallmark Guy simply takes her on face value and while she drives him up the wall at times, she is a refreshing change to so many people around him and he begins to deeply value, and yes, love her for that.
In the interest of setting the scene so you know why Flora and Connor are in such close proximity, the former has decided, with the urging of Lizzie, that after getting fired from her job at a Christmas supplies shop – the best in London and her dream place to work; shame about the nasty owner – she needs to take control of her own destiny and start her own company where she is the boss.
This takes the form of a van which, after arriving in Stockholm from her home in London, she will take to the biggest Christmas market in Lapland up in the north of Finland and see if she can’t turn selling Christmas items into a sustainable “Van Life” career.
(courtesy official Rebecca Raisin Facebook page)
Some early issues aside, and Connor enters the piece rather early when he helps her resolve one of them, Flora makes it to the market, finds her spot, gets a great supplier of cute Christmas products who becomes a close and treasured friend in time, and soon becomes a part of the community with friends like Rakeel, Tuomo and others who value Flora’s quirkily garrulous persona and her willingness to take on the sort of battles others would recoil from.
Like getting giant gingerbread houses approved for us after they’ve been delivered, and refusing to accept that just because something hasn’t been done before, that it can’t be.
That last imperative puts her into direct contact with Connor, the manager of the market who is an ardent recycler and warrior for the planet, who is a stickler for the rules, and who, after fleeing some personal trauma, doesn’t want to let anyone near him.
To make matters worse for Flora, he hates Christmas which is a weird state of being when you’re managing a Christmas market so Flora takes it upon herself to imbue in him a love of the season with a series of ever-escalating outings such as being the gaudily-dressed elf at visits to a children’s hospital and going on a sleigh ride through the impossibly romantic and festively snowy Finnish countryside.
‘Don’t ever change, Flora Westwood.’ He lopes away.
Don’t ever change? I put my hand to my van to hold me upright as wooziness runs through me. The men who have breezed in and then quickly out of my life have all told me what I needed to do in order to be right for them, and it always included my need to improve myself in some way. To change. To fit in a box. Have I blossomed her? Are my differences really intriguing or was Connor just saying that to help me save face?
She and Lizzie, and then Rakeel and Hanne, her supplier, join forces to help Connor realise how magical Christmas can be, and while he’s no fan of switching on the lights on the local town’s Christmas tree, he begins to see how passionate and sweet Flora is and that maybe all the things people have rejected her for in the past might be why he can’t help but love her.
Flora’s Travelling Christmas Shop is one of the best festive romcoms I’ve read this year or any other, full of an intensely funny and whimsically and beautifully evoked sense of Christmasness, but also a protagonist who you will come to love as much as Connor does.
Flora is the absolute best, someone who might hit hard but does so with a good heart, a caring soul and a love of Christmas that is powered by her deep and abiding memories of her dead grandmother, who saved her when her parents treated her like, you know, and whose best friend Lizzie is more family than her actual parents or siblings.
A force of nature in the very best of ways, and gifted some of the best dialogue a protagonist has ever been given – honestly the dialogue throughout Flora’s Travelling Christmas Shop is Nora Ephron-worthy and a bouncily, fun and poetically punchy delight – Flora is brilliant, the heart and soul of a brilliantly enjoyable festive romcom which not only wonderfully evokes the season in all its colour, cosiness and glory but which celebrates what it is to be yourself without apology, and better still, to be loved for it, not just for the season but way beyond.