This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Christine. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romance Novella category.
The summary:
Wealthy New York City girl Claire Lindell isn’t looking for a Christmas miracle or happiness when she abruptly decides to hole up for the holiday at her godmother’s cottage in a little Yorkshire village, and lick her wounds from a near disastrous romantic decision.
After her car skids into a snow bank, Claire may have accidently found her perfect Christmas and the family and love she’s craved when she offers Noah Bradford of Ayesgill Farm help to push the back end of one of his sheep out of the icy mud, even if she’s going to ruin a brand new pair of Prada boots during the rescue.
What’s a little leather when love’s on the line?
Here is Christine's review:
I started reading this novella on an unusually cool spring day in Los Angeles when it was actually overcast and spitting rain—pretty much as close to Christmas weather as you can get in that part of the country. I made tea, curled up on the couch with my iPad and everything was lovely. Then life intervened (like, twenty minutes later, as it does), we moved three hundred and fifty miles north and I’m finally getting back to it–rereading this Christmas novella now in hot, muggy weather. I still find A Yorkshire Christmas to be a solid piece of writing, but if you have a choice, reading it around Christmas time would definitely enhance the experience.
So, I know it’s probably kind of a drag to start out by talking about the technical aspects of the writing, but I think the thing that impressed me the most about A Yorkshire Christmas was the pacing. I’m often disappointed by novella-length reads because it seems like you get short-changed everywhere: the plot is too facile, the characters are two-dimensional, the setting never gets developed. The balance of plotty stuff, description, dialogue and revelations about the past is really well done here, though. The story moves along smoothly and economically toward its inevitable happy ending, but you still get plenty of evocative description of the Yorkshire setting and decent insight into the characters’ thoughts and motivations. It doesn’t feel rushed or superficial.
I’m a huge geek when it comes to old houses, so I loved the descriptions of the cottage Claire is borrowing (but where she somehow spends very little time!) and Noah’s family home—the eccentritities of the heating, the low doorways, the old appliances, the shabbiness and accumulated detritus of an old working farm inhabited by a bachelor, his dog and two hundred sheep. Good stuff! I also appreciated that the description of village life never veered into tweeness. The village, for example, does not magically have everything they need, provided by cheerful, quirky, rosy-cheeked merchants—Claire and Noah drive to a big supermarket on the outskirts of the next bigger town when they need supplies, and they bag their own groceries.
Claire and Noah basically felt like real people to me—I mean, suspciously good-looking people who apparently smell amazing even under the worst circumstances, but still… They had complicated backstories to which they reacted in plausible ways, they were self-aware, and they were honest with each other and themselves. For some reason, though, I never managed to feel particularly invested in their happiness as a couple. Noah had suffered a huge injustice in the past that I wanted to see righted, and his storyline with Claire didn’t get at the root of that at all. Claire, who is fleeing the aftermath of a bad romantic choice in New York, worries that she’s kind of pathetic and ridiculous, and I found myself agreeing with her self-assessment, unfortunately; I thought she had a lot of growing to do, and playing family with Noah didn’t feel like the best way for her to get there.
Claire’s family and Noah’s ex and in-laws were portrayed as generic baddies—heartless rich people who are too obsessed with their wealth and status to care about their children. Since they’re only part of the backstory and don’t have an active role in the novella’s events, I guess that’s okay, but the Heartless Rich Person trope is not one of my favorites, so I was a little disappointed that the author took the easy way out there. I know you can’t give every character a full biography in a short format, but I think Ms. Hewitt has the talent as a writer to sketch in a more realistic explanation for why these people have failed their families so comprehensively without derailing the central protagonists’ story.
You can’t review a Christmas novella without talking about how it delivers the Christmas feels. If you’re a Christmas junkie (or in need of a strong, emergency infusion of holiday spirit), this book might be for you. A Yorkshire Christmas is just chock full of everything you need to get the magic of the season stirring in your heart: hot chocolate, scarves, mittens, home-cooked meals, snow, coffee, tea, cookies, loyal dogs, vulnerable children, kissing, holly garlands, friendly neighbors, handmade stockings, carols old and new.…
If the author hadn’t managed to work these Christmas elements into a story that is grounded in a realistic portrayal of farm life (i.e. mud, sheep poop, dirty laundry, getting up before dawn to tend the flock) it would have been truly eye-rolling, but in this case it’s just the right amount of cozy cuteness for a Christmas romance. And speaking of romance, for those who choose their reads based on heat level, this is a very sweet story with some hand-holding, two kisses (I think) and one fade-to-black sex scene. You could definitely read it on your phone at a family holiday gathering and not get caught blushing.
Overall, there’s a lot of good stuff going on here—I just never got fully onboard with the romance. I would definitely read a full-length novel set sometime in the future where the wrongs in Noah’s past get righted and Claire is older, wiser and meaner. Maybe that one could be called Yorkshire Justice.
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Cookies? Umm biscuits surely if we are in Yorkshire I think or anywhere in the UK come to that. And for those of you that don’t know biscuits from ‘twice baked’ are what we over here call what you call cookies. Which means I always get a bit confused when a story refers to biscuits and gravy 🙂
I’d not thought of sheep as catalysts for romance until I saw the recent film of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. The fact that it starred Carey Mulligan and Mathias Schoenarts definitely helped.
@Jazzlet Well, the heroine is American, so just throwing a little of that US/UK confusion in there to be authentic to the book ;o) I’m so glad somebody else thinks about the etymology of cookies and biscuits (and I also would add refried beans to the list). Technique? Happy accident? Which came first? Does it matter? Not really, so long as I can have some!