Home in Time for Christmas

TEST

A writing professor once told me that dialogue isn’t conversation; it’s conversation’s greatest hits. I wish Heather Graham had taken this advice to heart, as her excessive dialogue and blocky writing style bogged down a book that had some potential.

Melody Tarleton is driving home for Christmas during a snowstorm when a man suddenly appears in front of her car. Thinking she’s hurt him, Melody rushes to help him, only to find Jake Mallory, a man who tells her the last thing he remembers is being on the gallows to be hanged for treason in 1776. Melody is convinced he’s a confused historical guide who hit his head a little too hard, so she takes him home to her family under the guise of a friend from college, until he regains his memory.

Jake, though fascinated by twenty-first century life, fears for his sister, alone in a dangerous and difficult time. However, he’s also growing more attached to Melody, despite her floundering relationship with another man. He must find out how to get home – and decide if he wants to go home at all.

My biggest problem with this book is that we didn’t get to know Jake well enough. It’s narrated in the third person, but we spend hardly any time in his head. He just wasn’t real to me, and while he seemed like a nice enough guy, I just don’t believe that Melody would have fallen so completely for him so quickly just because he’s polite and curious—nor do we get to know her well enough to warrant such an attraction. Their relationship falls uneasily between the reality-based and the fantasy-based. Either a relationship is realistic, or it’s irrational but Meant To Be. It can’t be both, and the author couldn’t seem to decide here.

The writing also bothered me. The author spends too much time with useless dialogue, like greetings and polite small talk, that don’t do anything but fill a conversation. Her writing style is also bulky and choppy. She overuses paragraph breaks, so that the emphasis created instead makes the book read melodramatically—and don’t get me started on all of the sentence fragments and slang. As I read this book, I wondered if, as a long-standing and prolific author, Graham is no longer closely edited. Home in Time for Christmas could have used some red ink.

The climax of the story dragged on in an unnecessarily long and complicated back-and-forth of events, the magic/science of the time travel was poorly conceived, and the entire book carried a moralistic lesson that was beat into our heads every other chapter. As much as I love Christmas stories, I just couldn’t get over all of my issues with this book to enjoy the holiday spirit that accompanies it.

Reviewed by Jane Granville

Grade: D+

Sensuality: Subtle

Review Date: 19/11/09

Publication Date: 2009

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Recent Comments …

  1. excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.

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