Christmas for One (No Greater Love)
“Life has always kind of happened to me without too much planning.”
Fate and happenstance as the primary architect of a life is very much a dominant theme of Amanda Prowse’s newest book, Christmas for One.
After a lifetime of disappointment and worry, Megan Hope’s future is finally looking up. Though her own childhood was grim, Megan is determined to make life better for her four-year-old son. She is in management of one of England’s premiere bakeries, Plum Patisserie, and is beloved of the two older women who own the establishment; as such, it is impossible to refuse when Milly Plum implores her to visit their troubled New York City site right before Christmas.
A chance meeting in an archetypal NY deli leads to a whirlwind romance for Megan; within hours she’s ready to say that Edd Kelly is The One. They spend two magical days together visiting a NYC travelogue of sites, including Coney Island, the Empire State Building, and skating at Rockefeller Center. They part with plans to explore their budding love story further. Cue fireworks and romantic music.
Of course, spanners are thrown into the works almost immediately, and Meg is left wondering what the hell happened, and if she’d opened her heart too quickly once again. It seems that her Christmas will be a solo affair once again.
Christmas for One is a light, sugary confection, perfectly suited for the holiday season. As is often the case with romantic fiction from the UK and Ireland, Meg’s world is peopled with believable characters with jobs, families, and realistic concerns. The sad backstory of the main character is sketched, but with a briskness that refuses to make her a tragic figure. There is also a healthy dollop of humor swirled into the story, even the heart-wrenching parts; this gives those sections a genuine pathos that a more heavy-handed treatment would obscure.
Meg herself is a buoyant character. A child “in care” after a neglectful mother lost custody, she unwittingly became the “other woman” of a wealthy man, and was left pregnant and alone when he died in a car crash with his fiancé.
This backstory, in less capable hands, could have led to a dragging, over-the-top melodrama book. Prowse, though, downplays her character’s challenges, moving through them at a brisk pace and wrapping all but the most poignant bits in a layer of humor and “I can do it!” that is worthy of The Little Engine That Could.
It would be easy, then, to get frustrated when Meg trusts Edd upon meeting him. “I don’t know how many times I can bounce back from having the rug pulled from under me, Edd,” she warns him, but there is a sense that Meg herself is not aware of her limits. That is never clearer than when, coming quick upon the heels of her first disappointment in this book, Meg reconnects with her decade-absent mother and commits to that relationship once again.
That level of positivity is in inherent Meg. “That’s because you are sweet and hope for the best, always. That’s one of the reasons we love you,” advises her friend Guy; as a reader, it’s just as easy to care about hopeful Meg Hope as her friends do. She’s funny, loving, and kind.
There are other strengths of this novel, not the least of which is the refreshing lack of clichés. Mothers-in-law are not automatically evil; people in their sixties are funny, sexual beings; and a romantic novel exists without fawning descriptions of six packs and godly beauty (on the part of either main character).
The dialogue particularly shines. There are typical verbal jabs as well as loving speech, and nary a conversation unlikely to happen in real life between actual people. Though there are brief sexual allusions, heat takes a back seat to romance in this charmer.
Amanda Prowse became an e-book sensation with her first self-published novel, and it’s easy to see why. Christmas for One is a sweet, humorous snapshot of a romance that, though unplanned and a bit magical, will elicit a sigh and a smile.