RITA Reader Challenge Review

Miracle on 5th Avenue by Sarah Morgan

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Isabelle. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

The summary:

It will take a Christmas miracle for two very different souls to find each other in this perfectly festive fairy tale of New York! 

Hopeless romantic Eva Jordan loves everything about Christmas. She might be spending the holidays alone this year, but when she’s given an opportunity to house-sit a spectacular penthouse on Fifth Avenue, she leaps at the chance. What better place to celebrate than in snow-kissed Manhattan? What she didn’t expect was to find the penthouse still occupied by its gorgeous—and mysterious—owner.

Bestselling crime writer Lucas Blade is having the nightmare before Christmas. With a deadline and the anniversary of his wife’s death looming, he’s isolated himself in his penthouse with only his grief for company. He wants no interruptions, no decorations and he certainly doesn’t appreciate being distracted by his beautiful, bubbly new housekeeper. But when the blizzard of the century leaves Eva snowbound in his apartment, Lucas starts to open up to the magic she brings…This Christmas, is Lucas finally ready to trust that happily-ever-afters do exist?

Here is Isabelle's review:

It’s simple to know whether you’d enjoy Miracle on 5th Avenue. Do you like Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, but wish they had slightly explicit sex scenes? If yes, Merry Christmas to you! This book is an eminently capable version of that. The elements are all there, and it satisfies, hitting all the beats just as you anticipate them. It feels like reading the tumblr Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things.

Miracle on 5th Avenue features an incandescently sunny heroine named Eva. She’s a hopeless romantic with a vaguely implausible job at the cringe-inducingly named Urban Genie, something that’s kind of a cross between an event planning company and Taskrabbit. The hero, Lucas, is a grumpy crime writer who hates Christmas. Places in New York that are especially magical during the holidays are visited: Rockefeller Center, Central Park, Tiffany’s, the Plaza hotel. The conflicts are mild but realistic: she understands his point of view, he understands hers, neither of them really has to make a change, and they earn their happily ever after. I enjoyed it in precisely the same way I enjoy a Hallmark movie or tomato soup in the winter. It’s warm and comforting and goes down easy.

One can easily envision the filmed version of this book. There are plenty of set pieces that could elicit swooning, like a Snowflake Ball at the Plaza. (I confess I’m a sucker for historical romance elements cropping up in contemporaries.) Add to that an Upper East Side apartment with a view of the city blanketed by snow, strolls down Fifth Avenue, and snowman building in Central Park, and you can see how the book strives to capture the particular sparkle of New York at Christmas time. Truthfully I might prefer the movie, since those Hallmark gems allow for seasonal multitasking, like baking cookies or napping.

When I finished the book, I felt unmoved by the characters and their stories. My dominant thoughts were twofold. One, that was pretty cheesy. Two, the New York of this book was circumscribed to a fraction of its actual sprawl. That pushed me to interrogate what I mean when I say something’s cheesy, and what I expect when writers set a book in New York.

I certainly don’t mean to say cheesy is automatically bad. Earnestness and happy endings are perhaps trademarks of Cheese, but I don’t think romance as a genre is automatically cheesy because it frequently features the former and contains the latter definitionally. So I reflected on things I love that I also consider cheesy, the movie Speed for example, to tease out a more refined definition of Cheese.

Ultimately I think there are a couple of narrative elements, in use in Miracle on 5th Avenue, that contribute to the cheese factor. One is characters who cleave closely to stereotypes. Eva is a creative professional in New York who loves romance, shoe shopping, and animals. She’s surrounded by a great group of supportive women. She’s cheerful and optimistic but not a pushover. Perhaps the only way she varies from a well trodden female archetype is her vegetarianism, which I find curious because she a) happily cooks meat for others and b) doesn’t appear to ever incorporate vegan proteins in her cooking. Nary a chickpea, not the tiniest cube of tofu. That has to be the most milquetoast portrayal of vegetarianism I’ve ever come across. She’s a vegetarian, but don’t worry, she doesn’t eat anything weird and she won’t force it on you; she’ll even make you bacon! No judgment if that’s how you practice vegetarianism– you’re not a fictitious person whose traits are shorthand for bigger themes, so do whatever works– but her character seems almost engineered so as to never ruffle a feather.

All that said, I don’t dislike her! I bet she’s be a fun person to be around and a good friend, even if when asked about her time spent in Paris she says banal, obvious things about bread. Plus a huge point in her favor: she’s an unapologetic sexual being. She cracks a dick joke with her pals, she’s not shy about enjoying sex, and although I certainly think of that as normal and healthy, indeed that may ruffle some people’s feathers.

Lucas, on the other hand, is a Male Writer, with all that might imply. He writes about murders, not happy endings. His apartment has that “just moved in” look because why would a man decorate his dwelling? His pantry is basically tumbleweeds because he subsists on whiskey. He quotes Hemingway to justify his drinking (I’m not even kidding). He’s got a bad case of man pain stemming from the tragic, sudden death of his wife. And you’d better believe he has no use for Christmas. I bet your brain is abuzz filling in more details about this guy–does he use beard oil? Is the soundtrack to his writing Miles Davis on vinyl? Dear reader, we can only assume: yes to both. Lucas is not exactly Mark from the McSweeney’s spoof Early Draft Of Hallmark Movie Screenplay: Christmas For Christmas (that guy’s too corporate), and Eva’s not exactly Jennifer (though not too far off), but there’s a reason that article does so much with so little.

Where Eva is a pleasant but innocuous heroine, Lucas has more potential to irk me. I mean, obviously. To his mild, mild credit, he declines to mock Eva when she rhapsodizes about the shoe floor of Saks Fifth Avenue, but I recoiled at the ultimate conclusion he draws when opening his heart to love again. He decides complicated women (like his deceased wife) are complicated to love and he’s better off sticking to a simple, sweet woman like our heroine, who makes love simple. It’s a little hard to tell whether the author is really positing that thesis, because if so: yiiiiiiikes. One can be charitable and hope he’s not generalizing from this meager sample size of women. One can also hope that perhaps it’s an example of bad reasoning that somehow still produces a correct conclusion. Finally, one can choose not to think about it too hard and just say, aw, the curmudgeon finally learned to love again.

Apart from broad characterizations, another cheese factor can be found in the plotting. Specifically, the choices characters make to drive the plot seem meaningful at first blush but don’t really reveal much about the characters’ nature upon deeper reflection. An example in Miracle on 5th Avenue comes during the first crisis, when Lucas writes a version of Eva into his manuscript, but she’s a baddie, and it makes Eva mad. (I would be honored? Clearly Eva and I are different.) Lucas scores some points with Eva by being helpful when they are confronted with a helpless injured puppy in Central Park. He’s not such a bad guy after all, she concludes; he cooperated so I could prevent a suffering animal from dying needlessly! Don’t trip over that low bar Eva set for you, Lucas. The whole plot is a like that. It doesn’t really take opportunities to surprise or challenge the reader’s notions about what Lucas and Eva are like deep down. And if you’re in the mood for that kind of cheese, I would never stop you, go ahead and eat it up.

Onto my second question: what do we talk about when we talk about New York? I picked this book to review because it has a bit of a snowed-in trope, which I love in general and wish this book had leaned into harder. Also because it’s set in New York, a city I hold dear as it was my home for over five years. I went into this book telling myself not to be snobby about verisimilitude, even though the book was taunting me right out of the gates by using 5th Avenue instead of Fifth Avenue in the title. After all, New York is not a monolith, and New York experiences are unique. Please read Colson Whitehead’s stunning essay for the New York Times about just that concept in post-9/11 New York for a better telling of this truth than I could ever give you.

I suspect the New York in Miracle on 5th Avenue will feel familiar to nearly anyone who’s spent any time there, because it’s so firmly grounded in the well-trod stretch of Fifth Avenue from the Upper East Side to Bryant Park. The landmarks are indeed iconic, if you’ve ever been there you’ve probably seen at least one of them, and between Thanksgiving and New Years, it really is quite a spectacle.

But what if I told you I once went on a date to a little mom and pop store in Queens where the pop repairs and sells vintage typewriters and the mom makes the most delicious baklava? Or another time, I went to a tiny museum just north of Central Park, in Harry Houdini’s boyhood home, where you can see chains he broke and tanks he escaped, and watch his silent films. Now those were some memorable dates, intimate, the kind that feel like a shared secret.

Except I never went to those places. I made both of them up. That’s what’s amazing about writing New York! It already contains everything, so virtually anything seems plausible; it’s like the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts. New York is pure potential energy, ready to be converted into something wild, kinetic, and exciting. When there are so many marvelous examples of New York in literature, it’s honestly a bit of a let down to trot over to Tiffany’s and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I’m not asking for fabulism, maybe just a little more imagination. It would, perhaps, make the book a little less cheesy.

But then again, maybe some cheese sounds really good to you right about now. Maybe, like Holly Golightly, you’re just crazy about Tiffany’s. Maybe a romance where the indefatigable dog wins over the standoffish cat really works for you. Nothin’ wrong with that. Just save it for the day you’re in need of precisely what it has to offer. When you don’t want surprising flavors, just a nice tomato soup.

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Miracle on 5th Avenue by Sarah Morgan

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  1. jas says:

    Great review!

  2. Joanna says:

    Awesome review – and yes this sounds like the kind of book to save for when the world is crazy and you need a really simple pick me up.

    Also thank you so much for the link to the McSweeney’s Hallmark Christmas screenplay, loved it!

  3. Suleikha Snyder says:

    As someone who lives in New York, I can’t get into this seres of Sarah Morgan’s at ALL. Because it really is about the big, known-quantity NYC. It’s a tourist brochure — perfect for people who don’t live here and don’t get chances to visit. Whereas I tried an earlier book and felt like I was reading a Zagat Guide, not a book set in the city I navigate every day.

    My personal go-to for NYC-set romance is Santino Hassell. I also loved Ruthie Knox’s use of NYC in Truly and Madly. Like Morgan’s, her characters came from somewhere else to NYC…but she personalized the city for them. They found a Wisconsin/Packers/cheesehead bar to be comfortable in! I don’t know if such a bar exists, but I definitely believe it could!

    Thanks for this review! It confirms that I’m not the target audience for Sarah Morgan, and that’s okay,

  4. Louise says:

    One can easily envision the filmed version of this book.

    Some of us have already seen it. Throw in a plot moppet and some Neil Simon lines and you’ve got The Goodbye Girl.

  5. LauraL says:

    I’m one of those weirdos who does Christmas in July. I went to the Hallmark store for the ornament premiere over the weekend, my DVR is recording way too many Hallmark movies, and my favorite Christmas mug is on my desk as I type. My husband talked me out of baking Christmas cookies for our Saturday night dinner guests.

    Sarah Morgan, who lives in the UK, is writing about New York in broad strokes with characters we recognize. So it sure does sounds like a Hallmark movie, complete with someone who needs to learn to love and to love Christmas again. I may have to pick up Miracle on 5th Avenue to read this week. Or maybe when I’m overwhelmed at the holidays. Cheese always helps me get through a tough time. Thanks for the fun review, Isabelle! The screenplay link was pure gold.

  6. Vasha says:

    I recently read Girl Least Likely to Marry due to the fact that it’s set in my hometown, Ithaca, NY. The heroine is a graduate student at Cornell University. Imagine my disappointment when finding that it not only is an utterly mediocre romance (with the heroine being rather a caricature of a socially awkward scientist), but there is zero local color. The description of Cornell is “students lying under trees.” Yes, and? If the author had at LEAST read Cornell’s publicity brochures she could have put those students on the Arts Quad between the statues of Ezra Cornell and A. D. White, pictured in every brochure. And if she actually knew the town… There’s a bit where the hero drives the heroine back to campus from the airport. Now, on that drive in real life there’s a place where you sweep around a hill and a splendid panorama of rolling hills and valleys opens up before you: thrilling however often I see it. That’s also about the point where you have to brace yourself to start fighting the insane traffic situation between downtown and campus. The author didn’t describe the drive at all. Imagine the missed opportunities for character revelation: how do the two of them react to the view? what sort of driver is the hero?

  7. Louise says:

    @Vasha:
    Go (re)read Nabokov’s Pnin, one of several novels that he set at Cornell. There’s one sequence where the narrator observes a group of workmen digging up the road in order to retrieve a screwdriver that was left behind at some earlier stage. Failing to find it, they eventually close up the hole again. From this we deduce that Cornell’s School of Road Contruction was already a going concern in Nabokov’s day.

  8. Louise says:

    (ConStruction. Urk.)

  9. Vasha says:

    “School of Road Construction”? Yep. The Vet School bus stop has been under construction for months with buses on detour, so if you take your pet on the bus for an appointment, you get off a quarter mile away and tote the little dumpling in their carrier that far.

  10. susan says:

    As former NY resident and someone who read Miracle on 5th Avenue, I can tell you that there are some major things wrong about the snow in NY in that book.
    First, the timing of the blizzard: we just don’t see that kind of snow before Thanksgiving–it just does not happen.
    Second: a storm that big is MAJOR news worldwide; everything would be shut down for weeks, especially with more snow right after. The book has things up and running pretty quickly.
    Third: the snow is described as sparkling for days after. NOT in NY! Because of all the utilities underground, the ground is relatively warmer. Within a day snow starts to turn to gray, slushy mush that gets everywhere, and swallows up street corners.

    If I can’t believe in the location, how am I going to believe in the romance.

  11. MsCellanie says:

    Great review! and I fully plan on stealing this line:
    you’re not a fictitious person whose traits are shorthand for bigger themes, so do whatever works.

  12. Vicki says:

    Just a note – I am a vegetarian who will happily cook meat for you, just not in my kitchen. And, at one place I worked, many of my co-workers happily used my garbanzo bean recipe and my vegan “meatloaf” recipe for their own families. That said, if you are going to have a character who is vegetarian and cooking meat for others, it is worth having them comment on it. Thanks for the review. It sounds like a great travel book, easy to put down and pick back up without having to think too much about it.

  13. MirandaB says:

    “My husband talked me out of baking Christmas cookies for our Saturday night dinner guests.”

    Mmm. Cookies.

  14. Jen says:

    I enjoyed this book, though I can certainly see where you’re coming from with this review. I did think Lucas transcended the stereotype on occasion, at least enough to keep me interested. When you hear “dead wife” you think you know his story, but there’s more to it, which I liked. And I don’t know that he really thinks Eva is “simple” so much as straightforward. She doesn’t bullshit, and that’s what he’s looking for. But, you’re right that this book is a light, feel good read for the most part, which is usually what I like in a christmas story.

  15. Msb says:

    I think i’ll stick with the McSweeney script, thanks.

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