A Merry Little Christmas | Cathy Bramley
REVIEWED BY LINDA HILL
Heavily pregnant Merry is struggling to come to terms with the fact she’s going to be a mother. With no role model to guide her, she is terrified that she’ll be a terrible parent. Her old friend and business partner, Nell, would give anything to be a parent. With two very different situations, sparks will fly and tempers fray. Add in a terrible discovery about Nell’s husband Olek and life is about to get very complicated.
A Merry Little Christmas: book review & synopsis
I confess that A Merry Little Christmas took me by surprise. I had anticipated Cathy Bramley’s usual warm and engaging writing, but within a light and festive narrative. I had not reckoned on the profound, moving and intense exploration of family. This might be a Christmas book with a background of seasonal festivity, but it is so very much more too. I thought it was fabulous.
That seasonal setting is conveyed with a lightness of touch through all the elements one might expect, from festive tunes to scented candles, food to Christmas lights and with the promise of snow, so that this is a perfect book for winter reading.
But it is the theme of family that is so affecting. Different kinds of family unit are presented with sensitive dexterity, and Merry in particular illustrates how our past experience affects our present approach to relationships. This makes A Merry Little Christmas feel inclusive as well as compelling.
Relateable, multi-layered characters
Indeed, Merry is a complex, realistic and multi-layered character. It took me a little while to accept her because she seems self-obsessed, prickly and rash – not the happy-go-lucky person she purports to be normally. However, as events unfold and we get to understand her, she becomes irresistibly sympathetic.
Nell, too, is similarly compelling and as the plot focuses on these two women, the mistakes they make, and their fallibilities, the writing is so skilled that their heartaches become ours, making for a deeply emotional story.
The plot essentially revolves around stubbornness, misunderstanding and missed opportunity – all aspects that are familiar and relatable so that the reader feels that what happens to Merry and Nell could happen to any of us.
Wise, warm and wonderful, A Merry Little Christmas, is intense, realistic and oh so emotional. It’s a mature and affecting exploration of family relationships that might just provide solutions for family issues that Cathy Bramley’s readers might face as they head towards Christmas. It’s just lovely.
A Merry Little Christmas by Cathy Bramley is out now (Orion, PB, £9.99) and available from Amazon.
Read more fiction reviews by Linda Hill including Miss Beeton’s Murder Agency by Josie Lloyd, It’s Getting Hot In Here by Jane Costello, A Christmas In Prague by Helga Jensen, Edith Holler by Edward Carey, The Black Loch by Peter May and Rewitched by Lucy Jane Wood.
