Kathy Hamilton 
I’ll let you in on a secret, I’m really not feeling that festive yet. Every day I see the announcements that there are so many weeks, days, minutes, seconds until Christmas day and I’m not filled with the usual Christmas buzz. In fact, I’m starting to identify with Scrooge from A Christmas Carol a little more than I like to admit! Maybe it’s because the Christmas lights in George Street in Edinburgh, where I work, are so lack lustre that they’re almost depressing…seriously it’s like they bought a strand of fairy lights and thought, “meh, these’ll do”. Or maybe it’s the unseasonably mild weather, whatever it is I’m not filled with glad tidings and cheer, and all the other usual Christmas stereotypes that I look forward to.
But I really want to be!
So, I decided that if I wanted to feel more in the holiday spirit the best place to start would be reading Christmas books. The only problem is that there appears to have been approximately 120475 Christmas books published this year. Honestly, there are so many choices out their I felt practically faint at the prospect of choosing a couple. Luckily for me, however, one of my favourite blogs Exploits of a Chick Lit Aficionado is doing a countdown of Christmas books and she very kindly recommended a few to me based on my very vague “it has to have snow” criteria, meaning I didn’t have to wade through the swathes of books on offer in the shops!
One of the books she recommended was “Just For Christmas” by Scarlett Bailey, and now I’m going to do my very best to recommend it to you!
From the description I was expecting a pretty standard romance which, don’t get me wrong, I always enjoy but in this case is slightly misleading. From the beginning of “Just For Christmas” I realised that there was going to be more to the story than girl meets hunky boy. Alex hasn’t just left Scotland because her best friend, and the man she loves, Marcus is getting married, she’s running away from herself and a life that she feels has been based on a lie. So right from the word go we have a heroine who is all sorts of levels of complex forced into an almost functioning human being.
I like Alex, she’s a strong, kind-hearted and determined woman who is tired of everyone’s expectations and perceptions of her. She’s also incredibly vulnerable and lacks confidence in herself outside of the comforts of work. It might be a bit drastic to up sticks and leave everything you’ve ever known to move to a tiny Cornish village but it’s emblematic of just how typecast and stifled she has come to feel in her life at home. I think it’s the sort of thing we all fantasise about doing to some extent, dropping everything to go somewhere new in the spur of the moment and have a fresh start, but I have to admit as much as I think about doing it I don’t mind leaving it to characters in books! Besides, it would take me more than a moment, however spurred it was, to plan the logistics of moving my hoard of books. I speak from experience: One girl, two suitcases and a ferry to Belfast…oh the horror!
Really this book is more about a journey of self discovery on Alex’s part, as Poldore becomes the catalyst to changes in her life and in herself as she begins to work out who she really is as opposed to who he she has been. From that perspective I really enjoyed “Just For Christmas”, Christmas and the New Year are the perfect time to start thinking about making a fresh start and offer the perfect chance to indulge in a bit of hopeful expectation. And with a love interest as dishy as Ruan, trust me, I was doing my fair share of indulging. I thought Ruan was a really good love interest; he’s a sailor- think Colin Farrell in Ondine rather than Captain Birdseye, which is a perfect compliment to Alex’s job as harbour master, he’s mysterious, kind and just as messed up as Alex herself which balances the scales somewhat. Plus, he’s a hunk…but I think I mentioned that already.
Arguably the romance that brews between Alex and Ruan is a side-line to Alex’s gradual self-realisation and the book has enough else going for it that it doesn’t need to rely solely on their relationship to be interesting. I’ve mentioned before how important I think it is for popular romances to include more than just the relationship between heroine and love interest and “Just For Christmas” did not let me down. In fact, I think it had possibly one of the most heart-warming depictions of friendship I’ve read in a long time, as well as the most progressive, between Alex and Lucy. Lucy is everything that Alex wishes she was, pretty, blonde, and completely comfortable with her femininity but instead of being jealous of Lucy, Alex forges a friendship with her which is not shaken by the revelation that Lucy *SPOILER ALERT* was not born a female. I was surprised and pleased to find that such a sensitively drawn transsexual character played such a prominent role in “Just For Christmas”. Bailey doesn’t make a big song and dance about Lucy’s sex change and Alex accepts the knowledge with little more than a moment of surprise, it’s just one aspect of Lucy’s character. For that alone this book stands out for me.
I have just one, teensy, tiny flaw. As lovely as the cover is, it’s also completely misleading. I draw your attention to well-groomed, well behaved dog in the bottom right corner for he is a lie, a cuckoo in the nest! As soon as you encounter Buoy, the rapscallion dog with a heart of gold and a stench that would curdle milk, you’ll realise that there is no way on this earth anyone would get him to scamper about so happily on a lead, or look so clean! Especially when Alex can’t even get him to share the, ahem, his bed for most of the book; you’ve got to love a dog with such pretensions to authority! Ah, I do love Buoy! As the proud owner of a terrier I couldn’t help laughing at the way Bailey describes his “I own you, you don’t own me” attitude, and I love that he’s the unofficial mascot of Poldore, because his die-hard attitude seems so apt. He sort of steals the show for me a bit, actually.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised by “Just For Christmas”, I love when books challenge my expectations- especially so with romantic fiction. The book is about the true meaning of love, acceptance and hope that surrounds Christmas. Poldore is like a little world away from the world and only reconfirms my wish to visit Cornwall, which is only strengthened by the possibility of meeting an attractive, brooding sailor! So, If you are in the mood for a sweet Christmas read, you can’t go wrong with this one!
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