(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
If you have always felt like you belong, like you have an undeniable, fixed and unquestionably certain place in this world, then you are a very lucky and blessed individual.
We all want and need that, with an animal need for community running hard, deep and strong in our veins but not everyone gets that, with many people left alone and forced to fend themselves.
That sense of isolation breeds some odd behaviours; well, not odd if you’re the one trying to survive without your imagined tribe – and yes, whatever your state of aloneness, fantasising about not being alone and who your family might be is a constant psychic and emotionally bolstering companion – but odd to anyone looking on.
Or, eventually even to you, if you’re like Imogen, the fiercely successful London-based events organiser and the protagonist in need of love, hope and actual people who give a damn about her of Sarah Morgan’s latest festive delight, The Christmas Cottage.
Having grown up with only a narcissist once-teen mum as her very much unwilling parent, Imogen has long understood that if she is to make it in this world, that she will be the architect and fulfiller of her own dreams, hopes and ambitions.
No one is going to do it for her; certainly, not her mother who insists her daughter, a term she refuses to embrace, calls her Tina and who goes so far as to banish Imogen from her life.
She [Dorothy] knew there was more Sara wanted to say. She knew Sara didn’t want her to go back to London again, but that wasn’t going to stop her going. She would do what she needed to do.
You couldn’t undo the past, but you could do your very best with the future.
All of that takes places far too close to Christmas for comfort, leaving Imogen reeling, and wondering where she goes when she only has herself for company and no one seemingly in her corner.
Even worse, Imogen’s whole publicly-admitted life is a falsehood – she doesn’t have a Golden Retriever dog called Midas, her family doesn’t live in a big, sprawling house in the English countryside, and she doesn’t have the boyfriend of her dreams, just waiting to make her every dream come true.
Sure, there are photos on her desk promoting those non-existent facts to her coworkers, who adore their boss, but they are, like just about everything else beside Imogen’s super-successful career, at which she manifestly excels (to great personal cost as it turns out), products of Imogen’s overactive and she thinks, necessary imagination, a need to fake-it-til-you-make-it so she looks just like everyone else.
But you can’t just magic up a family or partner or pet out of nowhere, and when an understandable but “catastrophic mistake” sees Imogen desperately needing somewhere to escape to for some much-needed introspective, healing R&R, she begins to understand that maybe embracing life as it is might be the only way she’s going to be able to go forward.
That, however, is easy said than done, and so, when her favourite client Dorothy invites her to spend her month of boss-ordered reflection out in the Cotswolds, Imogen accepts because what other choice does she have?
(courtesy official author site)
It won’t surprise you to learn that all the things Imogen has hard to pretend were hers, including love, true love, end up manifesting themselves in some sort of fairytale-like fashion – The Christmas Cottage is, after all, one of those delightful festive novels where all your wishes can come true simply it is the most wonderful time of the year.
But the real joy is how brilliantly well Morgan brings Imogen’s rebirth and renewal about.
The Christmas Cottage is a smartly-written, warm and cosy story of love redeemed from the cruel ashes of life, but while it ticks all the appropriate boxes in a way that makes you feel like you’re wrapped in a cosy blanket of seasonal love and possibility, it does so in a way that is brutally and necessarily honest about how life can play out.
Quite specially, The Christmas Cottage embraces the idea that things can be go terribly wrong, from being raised by narcissistically uninvolved parents to losing a key member of your family to tragically preventable circumstances (or maybe not preventable at all; that’s a story for another day) and that fixing them, if they can be fixed at all, is no easy thing.
As Imogen settles into her dreamlike new, if temporary, life in a cottage on the edge of Dorothy’s estate – her family has done very nicely from wine, thank you very much, and live the kind of life that is the stuff of Imogen’s family-centric fantasies – she is faced with all kinds of choices and realisations, one of which it is how hard it is to forgive yourself and others for the “sins” perpetrated against you.
If Imogen could leave the past behind, then so could she. She could choose to move on and finally forgive herself for whatever part her actions had played in past events. She could accept that the responsibility for everything that had happened was not all hers.
And she could be grateful for what she had right now.
There’s no doubt those “sins” will be forgiven and that Imogen will find a new life rising from the snowy ashes of the old, but Morgan beautifully and quite empathetically brings this about, her emotional honest adding really special to The Christmas Cottage.
This willingness to face up to about how terrible life can be and how hard recovering from all those slings and arrows of misfortune can be imbues The Christmas Cottage with the real, hardscrabble stuff of the human condition, making Imogen’s eventual healing and restoration, which is as all-consuming and lovely as any redemptive festive tale should be, feels so much more grounded and earned.
Quite magically, all this honesty doesn’t detract from the magical escapism of the storyline which delivers on all counts in its quest to hold up Christmas as a time of miracles and new beginnings, and if anything, the novel feels stronger for its presence.
The Christmas Cottage is a joy, not simply because someone who didn’t belong, or who felt that no one really loved or needed her finds out they most certainly do, and at Christmastime too, but because Imogen’s journey from lost and alone to embraced and unconditionally loved and cared for, feels so real and true, and thus, her fairytale ending, feels far more rooted in reality that you might expect, and thus all the more escapistly wonderful and emotionally impactful than it might otherwise be.