The Christmas Letters
By Lee Smith
Algonquin Books, $12.95
ISBN 1565121562
Review by Jeannie Crawford-Lee
Lee Smith adopts the epistolary style she used so effectively in Fair and Tender Ladies to bring us The Christmas Letters. This uniquely American genre, the Christmas letter, is her vehicle for chronicling three generations of women. Birdie initiates the Christmas letter tradition as a young war bride in rural North Carolina in 1944; her daughter Mary picks up with her story from 1966-1993; and Mary's daughter Melanie adds the Coda, a final 1996 epistle.
Smith deftly reflects the many social changes of those years, sometimes ever so subtly, in the mostly chin-up annual reports. Just below the surface, though, we sense the human emotions that accompanied moves from rural to urban life, the shifting expectations of marriage, the pain of war, the sting of divorce, as well as the joys of romance, children, and good recipes!
Jeannie Crawford-Lee is a writer and editor.
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