Last Christmas, looking for something Christmas-y to read after I finally finished my semester, I ran across a novella by Lisa Kleypas called Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor. I've been reading Lisa Kleypas for years now-- she's a great writer, and very prolific. She has some quirks that are traditionally hers, which her fans both love and roll their eyes over. For example, her heroes are almost always instantly smitten by the heroine, usually at first sight--sometimes to unintentional comic effect, as in Worth Any Price, where the hero sees the heroine for the first time at a distance and starts to get hard. She's also known for her amazing vocabulary--I finally had to look up "plangent" after it appeared in so many of her books (it means "loud," essentially), and in the most recent one, she says that during a panic attack, the heroine thinks trying to breathe is like trying to "insufflate" corn syrup through a straw. How can you not admire an author who finds a way to use the word "insufflate" in a sentence in a romance novel? I love this woman.
Some of her books are among my favorites: the Wallflower series, Stranger in My Arms, Suddenly You. Some, I've enjoyed but had reservations about (the Hathaways series, Worth Any Price, Then Came You, and her recent contemporaries about Texas). Some I've actively disliked. But most importantly, her plots always make sense, even the ones I didn't care for. She is one of my most reliable authors, one whose books I wouldn't hesitate to buy or at least track down at the library, even knowing that they're not all going to be five-star reads.
So I quickly downloaded the Christmas Eve novella. Novellas can be really unsatisfying-- there just isn't enough room for real character development. But it was by Kleypas, and it was on sale for the holidays, so it wasn't much of a risk. I loved it. Mark Nolan becomes a single dad when his sister dies in a car accident. Six-year-old Holly comes to live with him and his brother Sam, but Mark is her sole guardian. Holly is so traumatized by her mom's death that she doesn't speak. One day they meet Maggie, who runs a toy shop in town. Maggie has an immediate connection with both Holly and Mark, and the story of how they come together is really well done. Yes, it's a little unrealistic how quickly Holly's problems are solved and the happy ending arrives, and yes, you really wish Kleypas had done it as a full-length novel to get more depth of character, but on the other hand, you know going into it that it's a novella. By definition it's going to be a little light on depth.
The second book in the series a full length one, Rainshadow Road. It's about Sam, Mark's brother, who falls in love with a stained glass artist named Lucy. There were some things about it that I thought didn't work very well-- for one thing, there's an added paranormal element that seemed tacked on to me, as if after she finished the first draft, her editor told her she needed to add paranormal stuff because it's what selling right now. And for another, even though it's an extra hundred pages longer than Christmas Eve, it still left me feeling like I had read a novella. There just wasn't a lot of depth. But it was a fun read, and I wasn't at all sorry to have read it. I just wished I had checked it out from the library instead of spending $9.99 on it.
The third book in the series is Dream Lake, which I read over the weekend. I was going to review it in the same post as the first two, but it got so long that I moved it to its own post. So: to be continued......
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