Christmas Reading Challenge – 03 – Last Christmas – Julia Williams

Delighted and excited to announce that @BookElfLeeds has a brand new reading challenge!

Jess had decided to seek out the Christmas Spirit in contemporary fiction. And like all good reading challenges; there’s a strict criteria to be followed.

The book must have Christmas in the title.
Some one has lost the Christmas Spirit.
A Christmas Miracle will therefore have to occur.
Some one will then regain the Christmas Spirit.

So please, make yourself comfy and enjoy the third review!

Who has lost the Christmas spirit?

Oh God, everybody

In what form does the Christmas Miracle occur?

Slight spoiler, but this is Proper It’s A Wonderful life territory here. Though the actual Christmas Miracle is “People Rejecting Consumerism”.

This is proper full blown mid to late noughties chick lit, with all the appropriate tropes. There’s the middle class couple who live beyond their means, have a stereotypically foreign and awful au pair, and Don’t Have Time For Each Other. There’s the mousy school teacher looking for love, the heart-broken single dad with the cute kid with a Secret Talent, the bossy large-bosomed matron who gets her comeuppance, and, because this is just post-credit crunch, the nasty capitalist with a hidden agenda.

The various characters all have had issues that come to a head the Christmas before, which are explored over time, and all are in need of getting their shit together. One of the sub plots involves the mental health of a partner, which isn’t dealt with as sensitively as it would be were the book written now, as our thinking about depression has changed so much in the last ten years, but apart from that, this is all rather jolly, if very predictable.

I really enjoyed this! It was incredibly nostalgic to read something that used jokes about older people talking about “Interwebs” and “Skiiing the Net” and where the teenagers still text each other. This was also incredibly Christmassy. The majority of the action is set in the village of Hope Christmas, and characters have names like Noel Tinsall. The hunky shepherd is also called Gabriel, which was pleasing. Occasional fuzzies were felt.

Listen to @BookElfLeeds and I introduce the Christmas Spirit Reading Challenge – HERE

Or just click here!