The Plight Before Christmas
The Plight Before Christmas needs an editor, has leads in their late thirties who behave at least ten years younger, and manufactures so much angst in its final few chapters that I felt cheated the book didn’t come with its own tissues.
Our leads, Whitney and Eli, were in love seventeen years ago and–shocker–it ended badly. Now, Whitney, who lately has been having a shit life, comes home for the holidays to her family’s giant cabin in the North Carolina mountains. Her large family is also there too…. including Eli who now was invited by brother, Brendan. (He didn’t know their history.) All of the family is portrayed with great detail here–I really enjoyed toddler Peyton–and there’s a lot going on in all the varied relationships.
It’s clear from the beginning that Eli has come to make amends and win back the woman he loved and then dumped his last year of college. This didn’t really do much for me. He’s forty and the two dated for eight months back in the day. He’s also rich, handsome, funny, great in bed, and wonderful with kids–I had a hard time believing he’d never have found another love. And it seems like the only reason Whitney, despite coming from the world’s most perfect family (her two siblings are married with kids), never settled down was because she never got over Eli. That’s a lot of wasted time: they should have moved on years ago!
And while I loved Whitney’s family–both of her siblings are facing some marital challenges–they did distract from the love story. But really, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Whitney and Eli spend what seems like eons remembering their pasts, regretting the pasts, thinking about the impact the past has had on them–a hundred pages in, I was wildly bored with their interior monologues. This is a story that needed half as many pages as it has.
In the last chapters, Eli comes clean about the reason he behaved caddishly all those years ago. And, whoa, was it a downer. His past has so much trauma that I began to doubt he had his shit together now. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of angst in contemporary romance and here, after pages of sexy times, family pranks, and amusing kids, Eli’s true confession sucked all the joy out of the novel’s HEA.
I guess if you’re looking for a holiday story with a sweet but foul mouthed family (they really were my favorite part of the book), and a lead couple whose sex life, both imagined and real, is given lots of page time–much of it in memory–and you are more patient than I, this one might work for you. It didn’t for me.