Popular authors set the tone for the season
REVIEWS BY LACEY GALBRAITH
White lights, mistletoe, normally staid individuals parading around in fuzzy red stocking hats: it's certainly Christmas time again, and aside from a wish for more shopping days, the holidays bring with them a rush of spirited fiction for the season.
A present of the past
The most recent addition to Karen Kingsbury's Red Glove
Series, Sarah's Song is the story of how one woman's faith can touch multiple lives. Frail with heart failure, 86-year-old Sarah Lindeman prays for the strength to get through one more Christmas and the chance to tell her story through the words of a song she wrote years before—words that were "born of despair, desperate for a second chance." Sarah knows she must share with someone else that year of 1941 when "heaven cracked open and spilled stardust and miracles into the life of a woman who had given up hope." Beth Baldwin, Sarah's nurse in her assisted living facility, is the one God chooses. Though she's never quite sure why, at least not until the very end, Beth allows Sarah to show her the aged ornaments that decorate her small Christmas tree. Over the course of 12 days, Beth hears their story of grace given and love bestowed, which adds hope and direction to her own life and marriage.
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Carol of the bells
Luanne Rice's Silver Bells brings romance to the holidays. Christopher Byrne, a Christmas tree seller in Nova Scotia, is still distraught over the disappearance of his only son the previous December, while Manhattan widow Catherine Tierney just can't let go of her late husband's memory. Neither one expects a relationship to develop, for each has remained isolated within their own sorrows for so long. Silver Bells is part love story, part familial drama with an extended assortment of characters—daughters, friends, bosses and sons. Using the holiday and its often-mystical ways, Rice brings her characters together through circumstances and the coincidences of fate, teaching them what it means to let go of the past and take on the joys of the future.
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Christmas in Dixie
Quirky and full of small-town characters, A Redbird Christmas is pure Fannie Flagg. It's the story of Oswald Campbell, a Yankee come South, and a man resigned to his Chicago doctor's prognosis of terminal emphysema and less than a year to live. Moving to Lost River, Alabama, though, he finds that not only does the slow pace and beautiful setting agree with him, but that the community itself has a way of redeeming whatever's hurt, lost or marred in the world at large. Whether it's the healing of a redbird with a broken wing or a little girl with twisted bones, the people of Lost River are a community in the greatest sense of the word. Underscoring Flagg's ability to turn fiction into an enviable wish for reality are the recipes included at the end of the book. France's Macaroni and Cheese and Betty Kitchen's Banana Pudding make a reader feel as though he or she really has spent the last few hours in the company of Lost River's dearest souls.
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Where there's 'Smoke'
As the narrator in Paul Auster's Auggie Wren's Christmas Story remarks, "How could anyone propose to write an
unsentimental Christmas story?" Auster though, does manage it and this slip of a book is by far one of the best offerings
this holiday season. First appearing on the New York Times Op-Ed page on Christmas Day, 1990, and then five years
later as the feature film Smoke, this unusual Christmas tale has now been given rich illustrations by the
Argentine illustrator ISOL. No matter the form, the story is still as engaging and satisfying as ever.
Auggie Wren is an odd little man who works in a cigar store and takes thousands of pictures of the same
street corner at precisely the same time every morning. The mystery of Auggie's identity and the Christmas
he spends in the company of a blind woman reads at first like a riddle, but as the narrator soon realizes,
"If you don't take the time to look, you'll never manage to see anything." Far from sentimental,
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story is a smart, slightly offbeat holiday tale that should be at the top of any gift list.
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A dose of holiday jeer
Most Christmas novels suffer from an overabundance of sweetness or a glut of requisite miracle making.
Not Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel. In fact, Moore starts off with a tongue-in-cheek warning claiming it may
not be the best gift for the grandmother or child on your list. Then again, if your intended isn't afraid of satiric
one-liners, twisted small-town goings-on and zombies intent on Christmas cheer, then maybe Moore's latest is the best
present out there. In fact, it's more of an anti-Christmas story than anything else, meaning he does a good job of
sending up the genre, shaking up all that is normally accepted—heavenly angels, red-cheeked children, eggnog by
the fire—yet still creating a place and a cast of characters that is entirely festive and spirit-filled. Not
for the faint of heart, The Stupidest Angel is wild in its telling (stoner lawmen, Vicodin-drenched fruitcake) and
fantastical in tone (the cemetery dead trade barbs) but most definitely original and likely to join Moore's other
books on the list of cult favorites.
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