A Ferry Merry Christmas is the latest Christmas novel by Debbie Macomber. The cover is atrocious, a Photoshop disaster with a wonky perspective where the woman at the stern appears to be floating in space. This slight hardcover has a retail price of $34 Canadian. Surely the publisher can afford artwork that isn’t so amateurish. Macomber has the reputation to command a steep price for such a clichéd story; I was rolling my eyes at how hackneyed it was. Macomber must be out of ideas. Even the ones she used in this novel were repeated endlessly. Does she think that her reader base has no attention span? She packed the small 254 pages, which were already set with gaping spaces between the lines, with reminders of things already stated a mere dozen pages ago. A classic way to fill out a book sorely lacking in substance.
Avery Bond is a young woman taking a ferry trip across the Puget Sound from Bremerton to Seattle two days before Christmas. About halfway through the voyage the ferry loses power. The passengers are stranded. They get irritable and it isn’t long before the ferry’s small concessions counter runs empty of all food items. This is a romance novel so it isn’t long before people start talking to one another as the ferry sure as heck isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Avery meets Harrison Stetler, a Navy guy who is too confident of his own skills at pulling women. He is a typical Macomber romantic male lead: while he may not be one of her stereotypical “bad boys”, Harrison is obnoxiously assertive in telling Avery what he wants and where he wants the relationship to go–before there even is one to begin with.
Meanwhile, who should meet up on the Seattle side but Avery and Harrison’s siblings, who are waiting to pick them up. Kellie Stetler and Reed Bond discover that they do in fact work together at Microsoft, and Reed had been harbouring a crush on Kellie for some time now.
The stalled ferry tells three other storylines, all of which resolve themselves for the better just before Christmas. We meet two elderly twin sisters who had a falling out years ago over a will. They eventually reconcile. An expectant father is frantic that he will miss the opportunity to be at his wife’s side at the birth of their first child. The whole ship joins him in helping him coach his wife via telephone. The most annoying of these three secondary stories is that of an insecure young husband and father who is estranged from his wife and daughter. Logan feels emasculated by his in-laws over their ability to provide for their daughter ( = his wife). He suffers a hulking insecurity complex which his wife Beth is blind to. She is still in love with him whereas most women would dump him for the wet blanket he really is. They have a young daughter named Olivia, who is Little Miss Chatterbox and skips all over the ferry. Macomber portrays her as befriending all the passengers but if I was one of them I’d be pretty damn annoyed by her. I knew this novel was headed deep into clichéville as soon as page 14, when Olivia, who realizes she may not be able to see Santa on account of the ferry’s delay, says:
“I need Santa to know what I really want for Christmas is my daddy to come home.”
OMG, not more children asking Santa for estranged parents to return or for their mommy to give them a baby brother or sister for Christmas. It is just a coincidence that Logan and Beth are on the same stalled ferry. They have the opportunity to talk things over, which apparently they never did during the whole two years they had been separated.
What I couldn’t understand after the ferry stops is the author’s bizarre convoluted plan to rectify the situation. The plan is to send out a part so repairs could be conducted on the ferry as it sits idle. Yet the search for the elusive part takes hours, and when it is finally located and shipped over from Seattle, the fixit job doesn’t work. Only after many hours adrift did someone decide that it might be a good idea to send a tugboat out to tow the ferry to Seattle. Why wasn’t this thought of first? Surely the ferry could have been towed to Seattle and fixed there. There was no need to leave the passengers in the middle of the Puget Sound while nothing was happening. However, there wouldn’t have been a story to tell otherwise, so…
As Macomber is a Washingtonian I was puzzled by her reference to Mount Saint Helen’s. Did Macomber write it as a possessive because she thought the volcano was called Mount Saint Helen? I have also always seen the name of the volcano spelled as St. and not in full as Saint.
With so much joy as couples meet, couples reconcile and a baby is born, the ferry is awash with tears. My goodness, I’ve only ever seen more tears in all those Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Everyone is crying in this novel, with waterworks either turned on full blast or squeezed to that one blasted solitary tear just barely holding on before it drips down the cheek.