This week I read two Christmas novella historicals to get me in the spirit of the season: I Will by Lisa Kleypas and A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong by Cecilia Grant. I have trouble with romance novellas, generally speaking — it’s my opinion that romances are all about pacing and novellas are especially difficult to satisfactorily pace — but that doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyable, and these two were charming (if imperfect) little stories. At the end of this post, I’ll tell you about a few more Christmas novellas I’ve enjoyed. It’s a staple of the genre, after all!
(Both reviews feature minor spoilers, but nothing that should drastically alter your reading experience.)
Published 2016, I Will by Lisa Kleypas is a sliver of a novella, a tasty crumb that goes down very quickly, and though it won’t fill you up, it probably will make you smile. The premise, reminiscent in part of the set-up of Loretta Chase’s classic Lord of Scoundrels, is as follows: Andrew, Lord Drake has been disinherited by his father for being a dissolute rake, so in order to fool his father into believing he’s not such a scoundrel, he turns to respectable spinster Caroline Hargreaves, whose younger brother he has been slowly but surely leading to ruin. The deal is this: If Caroline lets Andrew pretend to court her, then Andrew will keep her brother out of trouble by preventing him from gambling away his family’s money and paying off his not inconsiderable debts. With no choice but to accept, Caroline agrees to attend an upcoming house party being hosted by Andrew’s half-brother, though she is loath to spend any time with the terribly wicked Lord Drake. As you might imagine, once they are thrown together — with Andrew on his best behavior, no longer drinking to excess or carrying on illicit affairs — they find they actually might like each other.
What follows is an unusually-paced love story, though not an unsatisfying one. The events take place over the course of several months (with some of those months passing in the space of a sentence), while a single day at either end earns multiple chapters. That’s not strange for a full-length novel, but in a novella, I am used to a more intense timeline, with all of the lovers’ interactions occurring on the page (as happens in A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong). The result is slightly off-kilter; on the one hand, the relationship feels more solid, more believable for having time to grow, but on the other, it’s difficult not to feel that we are missing large swaths of the courtship, all the little moments that allowed the love to blossom. Often when reading a novella my reaction is that it needed more space to breathe, and while I think in this case “need” is too strong of a word, I do wonder how this would’ve read if we’d been able to get more small scenes with the hero and heroine in between the big moments.
I also have to point out that, in truth, this isn’t much of a Christmas novella. Oh, certainly Christmas features. In the third act, after the lovers have separated by the usual misunderstanding/treachery that romances excel in, Caroline’s brother goes to some trouble to get her an unusual and memorable Christmas gift. There’s much to be said about how the novel resolves itself (I have mixed feelings, to say the least), but there’s nothing that especially feels like Christmas to me about this book — it just as easily could’ve been Caroline’s birthday, with very few details having to change. I liked reading this but it didn’t put me in the holiday spirit.
One of the key themes of I Will is the leap of faith. At one point, after Andrew has been “reformed” for a few months, Caroline wonders if she can trust that he won’t revert back to his old ways. She loves the man he is now, and fears losing him to the man he once was. This theme resonates strongly with A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong, a novella that makes its stance on the leap of faith quite clear. The heroine, Lucy Sharp, is the daughter of a falconer, and midway through the novella she offers up the following bit of wisdom regarding hunting falcons and the danger that they might simply fly away, no matter how well you train them: “You must rely to a degree on hope once you unfasten the tether. Hope, and faith that your efforts will have been enough. And as much peace as you possibly can muster with the possibility that they won’t.” Spoiler alert: she’s not just talking about falcons.
This is a book that advocates openly and ardently for the leap of faith, and in a way, that’s what makes it work so well. Lucy and our hero, the ever-proper Andrew Blackshear, end up alone together over the Christmas holiday due to a series of disasters and questionable decisions: an injured driver, a snowy road, a broken wheel. Lucy, pragmatic but sheltered, doesn’t give a fig about propriety and only wants to enjoy the holiday; Andrew, honorable to a fault, can’t stop panicking about inappropriate his time spent with Lucy is … not to mention the thoughts he keeps having about her. The events of the novella take place over a span of about three days, but the characters’ self-awareness about how fast things are moving, as well as their reasonable trepidation regarding the major differences between them, kept me from reacting like everyone in Frozen after Anna announces she’s engaged to Hans.
Speaking of differences, I was entirely charmed by the dynamic of the lovers in this book. I’ve never been the biggest fan of rake heroes (they’re fine, they’re just overdone), but give me a stodgy prig of a hero any day! Andrew must learn that duty and propriety need not always come first, without entirely compromising the nobleness and sense of responsibility that makes him who he is, and the way that Lucy’s very presence, simply her way of being in the world, pushes him to question himself is handled very well. Lucy was delightful too, because while it can be appealing to pair the prig up with a bold, shocking heroine, Lucy is both more and less complicated than that. Her lack of propriety is shocking to Andrew, but not deliberately so; rather, it speaks to their very different lives and experiences. This makes her moments of earnest vulnerability and provinciality all the more endearing to the reader and Andrew alike.
This was also emphatically a Christmas novella, with Christmas — the hopes and expectations attached to it, the remembrances of what it once was — playing a role nearly as important as that of the hero and heroine. Each character begins with an idea of what their Christmas will entail, and each experiences something altogether different, and harder, and more beautiful than they could’ve imagined. And, in a way, the same is true of love. As the story progresses, they realize with dawning horror — and excitement — and hope — and fear — that this was never how they imagined falling in love … but (of course), as the characters in a romance novel always learn, isn’t it better that way?
A few more Christmas novellas I’ve enjoyed…
A Christmas Bride and A Christmas Beau by Mary Balogh, both of which feel extremely cozy and are practically bursting with all the best Christmas tropes (snowball fights, cocoa, a Christmas pageant, sleds, decorations, small children doing cute things)
The Duke of Christmas Present by Sarah MacLean, which is a sexy, angsty homage to A Christmas Carol featuring lost love and second chances … also, to be fair, I enjoyed all of the stories in How the Dukes Stole Christmas, which is the anthology this one is found in
A Vicarage Christmas by Kate Hewitt, which is a contemporary (!) romance that, to be honest, feels somewhat unresolved and suffers from the typical pacing issues of a novella, but which features what I found to be fairly moving meditations on family dynamics, feeling like an outsider, and coping with trauma
Not Christmas and not a novella, but I did just finish Whiteout by Adriana Anders, and given that it’s set in Antarctica, there’s a lot of reference to snow, ice, cold, and (of course) cuddling for warmth. There’s also mention of penis frostbite. It’s up to you if that’s the sort of thing to put you in the holiday spirit.
I’ve got a few more pulled out from the library, but who knows if I’ll get to them before Christmas Day? If I do and I think any of them are especially good, I’ll update this list!
What are your favorite Christmas romances? Holiday romances? Winter romances?