Leslie Lynch breaks new ground in her second Christmas novella. Although she invites us to spend Christmas on the other side of Louisville, Kentucky, she warns us to steer clear of Gertie, Ella and Natalie—three generations of brokenhearted women who dread the holidays.
Recently widowed, awash in grief, and stumbling through the shambles of her life, Gertie, 74, gathers more grief than consolation from her daughter. She avoids the domineering Ella, 50, during the holidays.
Mason, Ella’s husband, bemoans the fortunes of his slumping law firm. He sees Ella more as a convenience than a consort. He expects her to drop her own plans to exhibit her ceramic creations in order to arrange the “traditional,” client-wooing Christmas gala.
Pregnant with Ella’s and Mason’s grandchild, Natalie, twenty-something, plans to ignore the holidays. They remind her of her husband, Connor, deployed to a war zone. She tells her mother, “I’m sorry, I won’t be able to help you…No Christmas for me…. I’ve just turned into a Grinch.” She cherishes her moments on Skype when she can almost touch Connor through her laptop screen.
Gertie proves the most imaginative, if reckless, in mending her broken heart, plunging into an extreme makeover, planning a sky-dive, and taking up with a guy on a turquoise motorcycle, she sparkles as she weaves and crashes through the story line.
The bulk of the novella measures the accumulated weight as each family emergency presses against Ella’s shoulders and forces her resentment to bubble to the surface. Obsessed with his declining client base, Mason ignores Ella’s plight. While squeezing the “Merry” out of “Christmas,” he snuffs out the embers of Ella’s love for him. He not only stifles his family-life but the flexibility essential for his company’s survival. Much to his dismay, Ella decides to dig in her heels.
Can Leslie Lynch, the award-winning romance author, snatch these harried “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” before they go up in smoke? There’s no easy fix. Those who anticipate their own hectic holiday appreciate the pain of apparently insoluble family situations. Christmas Grace offers them hope, adjusts their frame of mind, and revives the meaning of the words Christmas, family and holiday.
DonMulcare
A retired biologist with current interests in vegetable gardening, volunteering at a local nursing home, reading, and writing. Other activities include the study of the practical aspects of applied Gerontology, splitting logs, digging for quahogs and writing blogs. https://dmulcare.wordpress.com/
Thanks for the review, Don! It’s always interesting (and a privilege) to see how others receive the words one has written, and where the reader goes with them. I loved your characterization of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” to describe this family, each of whom love the others but have forgotten how to show it. Not so unusual for many of us, though we all strive for better.
I loved writing about Gertie and Virgil; their romance was a bit of a surprise to me. But I also liked how Ella and Mason were able to rediscover each other and begin to mend their marriage, and how Natalie’s pregnancy was the glue that brought all of these flawed and oh-so-human characters together. In the end, God’s grace is what we all need, though in some it’s more obvious than in others.
Thanks again for exercising your stellar gift of reviewing the work of other authors! I hope to post a review for your work someday!
Blessings,
Leslie