This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Megan S. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Short Contemporary Romance category.

Here is Megan S.'s review:

There’s a lot of tugging at heartstrings in Michelle Major’s Christmas on Crimson Mountain. I hadn’t read anything by Major before, let alone any other books in this series, and I found it enjoyable and readable as a standalone. There were a handful of previous protagonists who drifted in to dutifully display their successfully-paired-off status, but I didn’t find it flagrantly obtrusive or detracting from the central romance.

Which is good, because April and Connor have a lot of emotional backstory to deal with. April is a cancer survivor whose husband abandoned her while she was undergoing chemotherapy. Now, she prizes her independence and self-sufficiency, but she’s scared to get close to other people again, and her experiences have left her insecure in her ability to love and be loved. She’s the caretaker (which apparently also means personal chef and meal server, which kinda surprised me) of the cabin rented by novelist Connor, who is attempting to complete an overdue manuscript. He lost his wife and young son in a terrible car accident, and he has survivor’s guilt as well as PTSD from the incident. He’s in better physical health now–his initial grieving instinct was to drink his pain away–but he’s still purposely sabotaging his emotional health.

April is in denial about how stuck her life’s been following her divorce, and Connor is in the opposite of denial about his grief and his sorrow. He’s stuck because he can’t forgive himself for surviving and couldn’t forgive himself if he were to be happy. It’s an interesting dynamic, and I felt sympathetic as April and Connor attempted to excavate their best selves–and helped each other with that task. I don’t have personal experiences akin to theirs, but Major took care to make their emotional struggles understandable and compelling.

While I didn’t think the angst too overwrought, it was certainly wrought, and I did sometimes find it one-note. Changes in characters sometimes felt lurchy rather than smooth or as subtle as they could have been. Connected to this problem, there was sometimes a vaguely paint-by-numbers feeling to their emotional and romantic development; when characters chose to be brave, and when they chose to retreat, too frequently felt dictated by the schedule of obligatory structural conventions. My personal preference would have been less of the immediate physical attraction, too, mostly because the emotional attraction that eventually developed between the two characters was far more interesting. It read like Connor’s immediate physical attraction to April (and his dislike of experiencing it) was added to the justification of his grief to help excuse how unpleasantly passive-aggressive he could be to her in the earliest chapters, which I didn’t enjoy. Even considering how depressed he was and the self-awareness that he uses rudeness as a shield, it still made me anxious to read.

What initially interested me in this book was April’s situation: she’s been named the guardian of the two young daughters of an old friend who died of cancer. April spends most of the book circling around her fears over whether to agree to this unexpected development: her cancer has been in remission for years, and she’s very good at caring for others, but she’s not confident about accepting love or seeking anything permanent. She doesn’t think she’s the best choice for the girls. Not when they have living blood relatives who could take the girls in: the catch is that the girls’ prickly aunt only wants cute and cuddly almost-five-year-old Shay, and not sulky and traumatized twelve-year-old Ranie. Frustratingly, it takes April most of the book to fully commit to becoming the girls’ guardian, but the right decision is obvious. She just has to braven up for it. As for Shay and Ranie, I found them believable and enjoyed what they brought to the story. In a book about grief and loss, having four characters with different levels of understanding and coping was very poignant.

One of the most interesting parts of the book was the push-and-pull interaction between surly, grieving, had-to-grow-up-fast preteen Ranie and surly, grieving, missing-his-family Connor. They bond over their desire to strip away the b.s. over what they’re going through, and unsurprisingly, the two of them forge a cautious respect of their own and provide a fairly predictable book with some moments of unpredictability. At a Christmas party, Connor demonstrates how he eventually turns out to be a complicated role model for her, after he suggests Ranie try writing down her thoughts, and she presses him on that:

“Did you keep a journal after your wife and son died?”

“I kept a tight grip on the liquor bottle.”

She barked out a laugh. “I don’t think you’re supposed to admit that to a kid.”

“You like real, remember.” He put a hand on her back, not quite a hug, but letting her know she wasn’t alone. “Losing a family member changes you. It’s a hole that can’t be filled.” He believed the words, but lately the hole inside him hadn’t felt so cavernous.

“I think it takes time,” Ranie told him. “At least that’s what the adults say.”

“They say that because they’re afraid of your sadness, and hope is an easy thing to offer.”

Her blue eyes flicked to him, and he cursed himself. What the hell was wrong with his mood? He wasn’t supposed to be bringing down a twelve-year-old girl with his own baggage. That was a total jerk move.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “Don’t pay any attention to me.”

“April’s pretty good at filling holes,” she said softly.

“Yep.” He looked to where April stood, the circle of friends surrounding her bigger than it was a few minutes earlier. She touched the woman in front of her on the cheek and then wrapped her in a tight hug. His heart sped up. “She gives good hugs, too.”

Ranie groaned. “Eww. Don’t corrupt me.”

I harbor fantasies that Christmas can bring people together in community and in chosen families, so I’m attracted to Christmas-set romances in a way I know other readers–some from other religious backgrounds, with other cultural traditions and other experiences–are not. When Christmas gets used as an emotional force shifting the characters, that’s a shorthand I’m eager to believe in, but it’s not universally appealing and it doesn’t necessarily make for a strong book as a whole. In the case of Christmas on Crimson Mountain, Christmas serves as a secularized default backdrop, and it creates a few nice moments. The gift that the girls make for April and Connor was sweet, and what it represents in terms of the girls’ hopes for a family, and how that symbol continues through the end of the book, was lovely as well. Christmas songs play a part, and I also quite enjoyed little Shay’s insistent questions about just how Grandma can get run over by a reindeer.

Even considering the perfunctoriness that the book didn’t completely escape, this is still an above-average category romance, and I’d particularly recommend it to readers who want an emotional story set at Christmas.