(courtesy official author site)
Falling in love at Christmas is de rigueur if you want to mark the season properly.
That or finding Santa Claus when he’s missing and saving Christmas in the process; but given how tough finding love can be often, maybe finding the big man in red is the easier of the festive options.
Unless, of course, you’re the central character in a novel like Snow Kissed by RaeAnne Thayne who has love come looking for her when she’s not even looking for it and who, even when it’s clear this Christmas is going to be all loved-up and full of love, true love, fights the idea that the most wonderful time of the year is anything but making money at the florist she runs.
Holly Goodwin Moore loves Christmas, adores her five-year-old Down Syndrome daughter Lydia, who is adored by everyone who meets the feistily loveable girl with a mind her own, and is surrounded by close friends and family in the small Idaho mountain town of Shelter Springs where she lives.
Having mostly licked her wounds after a messy divorce some two years previously, Holly is living a hard but reasonably contented life, buoyed by the support of her immediate family including twin sister Hannah and mum Paula, close friends like Natalie, and even her ex’s parents and siblings who love Holly even if she’s no longer officially part of the family.
What more could one small businesswoman in a picture-perfect American small town need?
Everything about this seemed wrong, she couldn’t help thinking, though she had to admit it felt great to know she had a man like Ryan on her side.
It made the prospect of the upcoming wedding far less intimidating.
Well one Lieutenant Commander Ryan Caldwell as it turns out.
He is the drop-dead gorgeous younger brother of Holly’s friend and employee Kim and he’s come to town to look after Kim’s daughter Audrey while she recovers from an accident, determined to stay only long enough to look after his wise, smart, eminently likeable niece and to depart when his job there is none.
But this is a festive romcom which means that whatever Holly might expect and Ryan wants, fate will intervene and they will, and do, find themselves on the quick route to falling headlong in love, an unexpected byproduct of a pact they make for Ryan to be the plus-one to the wedding of her ex’s younger sister and friend, Kristine, and for Holly in return to help Ryan put on a brilliantly good Christmas for his niece.
It’s a pact of convenience, and an inventively fun use of the “fake boyfriend” trope, and it goes pretty much where you expect it will go.
What elevates Snow Kissed, like all of Thayne’s smartly written romcoms, is the time she takes to build fully-formed character and to craft dialogue that actually feels real, believable and the kind of stuff that would actually come out of peoples’ mouths.
That’s not always the case in romcoms where OTT situations, which might work if the characters were grounded and the dialogue rang true, end up spiralling into ludicrous execution and a strident sense of being wholly unhinged from any form of reality.
(courtesy official author site)
If you stop and think about it for a moment, the idea that two people would agree to the outrageously silly deal Holly and Ryan commit to is beyond the realms of believability; sure, it’s a staple of romcoms, but in real life, it’s an idea that strains the very bonds of credulity.
In lesser romcom-writing hands, that becomes readily and almost immediately apparent, but in Snow Kissed, thanks to how beautifully Thayne brings Holly, Lydia, Audrey and Ryan to life in particular it finally like something that could actually happen.
So, going on this wild ride with Ryan and Holly, who come across as genuinely decent people who deserve love and all the good things it brings, and whom you hope will find their way through reconciling with their estranged dad and getting through an ex’s family member’s wedding respectively, is a joy and a pleasure and you hope and pray, even though of course you know the outcome, that they will reach the finish line in each other’s sure and safe arms.
That they do is not unexpected; what is rather lovely about Snow Kissed is how Thayne crafts some rather wonderful moments, beyond the obvious epiphanies of romantic and physical attraction – it’s a non-spicy novel so any contact is limited to sweet and oft-regretted kisses – where we get to see the quality of people Holly and Ryan and how perfect they could be for each other if they’d only follow their hearts.
While her words touched him, he also felt a twinge of unease. He really hoped she didn’t fall for him. She deserved stability, someone who could stand beside her without hesitation or compromise.
He couldn’t be that man and he would hate for her to end up with a broken heart.
Their all but fated love affair takes of course against a festive backdrop, with visits to Santa, big town markets and home decorating all featuring prominently in a story that makes excellent use of its small town locale to summon up a cost sense of Christmas, full of community, support and love.
It’s exactly why we read festive romcoms and Thayne delivers beautifully in Snow Kissed, serving up a story that is fulfilling in and of itself but which feels even more cosily special because of the twinkling lights, the falling snow and the feasts centred around family.
The only place where Snow Kissed falls down a little, and it’s only momentary thankfully, is in the final act where a hastily-inserted and all but non-event trope, and some squeamishly twee carol singing (at least to this Aussie’s “ears”), interrupt the flow of an otherwise well-plotted, character-rich and seamlessly delivered story, leaving you wondering why those narrative hiccups were there at all since they they don’t really add much to the impact of the story nor what we know about various characters or their relationships.
It’s only a blip though in what is really one of the better festive romcoms of the season, and it means that when you reach the end of Snow Kissed, you are thrilled at how things work out, happy to have spent time with some quite wonderfully lovely characters and joyously satisfied that once again Christmas has prevailed in its redemptive goodness and people have got what they needed just when they needed it.