Rating: WARTY!
This is the first of a few seasonal stories I'm reviewing this year, and I wasn't impressed. It's really nothing more than a Disney princess fairy tale gussied-up for adults (and not well gussied, either), and the plot is more black and white than the ink on the page. This woman whose name I readily forgot, is a single mom. her husband is a complete villain, so we're given to understand, who has her neighbor spy on her and report back so he can call in frivolous complaints to child services. The worst one seems to be that there are children's toys all over the house, and this woman is unable to cope with that by offering simple instruction to her kids about cleaning up after themselves. She isn't poor. She lives in the family house. She and her kid are well fed and clothed. they're having no issues with payments on anything. Her biggest problem seems to be that she's completely inept when it comes to hiring a babysitter so she can work her job at a restaurant, because this is evidently the only kind of work she's capable of performing for reasons unspecified.
Enter her prince - the son of a wealthy business woman who passes out in her car at the end of the main character's driveway. It was crystal clear from that point onwards what was going to go down, so no mysteries to come. It's kind of pathetic really, but well representative of the kind of sap that seems to clog up Christmas like a lethal case of atherosclerosis. The novel was all over the place in terms of person, which didn't help it one bit. Why authors, who plainly admit that first person isn't up to it by the very nature of how they write, still insist upon using it and then clutzily switch back and forth is a mystery. This one jumped between first person PoV and third person omniscient, and it was right in the middle of chapters, which made it all the more clutzy and annoying, as well as a jolt every time it switched, This was really bad writing. First person doesn't make the character more immediate to me, and I certainly don't want to identify with someone as inept as this character was, nor do I want to read yet another story about yet another woman who can't make it without a man coming to her rescue. especially not at Christmas!
There seems to be a thriving trade in this kind of Christmas story, and even in this very title! Don't confuse this one with The Christmas Secret by George C. Bulpitt, The Christmas Secret by Wanda E. Brunstetter , The Christmas Secret by David Delamare, The Christmas Secret by Tesia Johansen, The Christmas Secret by Joan M. Lexau, The Christmas Secret by Jim Struzzi II, The Christmas Secret by Jeannie Watt, The Christmas Secret by Virginia Wright, to say nothing of variations like A Christmas Secret by Jim Cook, A Christmas Secret by Candace Hall, Christmas Secrets by Bayard Hooper, Christmas Secrets by Susanne McCarthy, Christmas Secrets by Ann Schweninger, Her Christmas Secrets by Breena Wilde, A Christmas Secret by Kurt Zimmerman, or even The Cowboy's Christmas Secret by Veda Boyd Jones. But you can't beat Noël's Christmas Secret by Grégoire Solotareff! Not that I've read it, but that title has it all, so it's the winner for me, only just beating out SANTA'S CHRISTMAS SECRET by John Kleiman!
Sheesh guys, get a friggin' original title for goodness sakes! You can see just from this what we're up against in trying to find a worthy Christmas-themed read. Not me. No more stories about Christmas secrets. I'm done!
