Christmas Letters by Debbie Macomber was another rapid read about a young woman, Katherine “K. O.” O’Connor who supplements her income by writing annual Christmas letters for people who aren’t crafty or wordy enough to turn their bland boring lives into stellar reading. She meets a psychologist named Wynn Jeffries whose theories on child rearing are controversial. She cannot stand the guy–only to find out he lives in her building. As a Christmas Macomber novel, they are bound to fall in love within days of meeting.
K. O.’s immediate turnaround from loathing Wynn to becoming enraptured by him was not believable. One day she is screaming at him in a coffee shop and the next day she is falling in love. I know Macomber’s novels are short (this novel was only 269 pages) but people don’t have such a dramatic change of heart overnight.
K. O. has the opportunity to put Wynn’s theories to the test when she is asked to look after her nieces and asks Wynn to join her. One night with the children was enough for him to capitulate. A child psychologist forced to heel and revise his whole professional practice after caring for a pair of demanding girls for a few hours? Unreal.
When I finished the novel I wondered why it was called Christmas Letters, as letters barely made an appearance. You’d think K. O. would be interviewing clients about their past year and slaving over her computer as she struggled to compose exaggerated tales of fantasy. Yet she was too busy lining up for coffee and hanging out with her psychic neighbour to do any work. It was this neighbour’s visions of K. O.’s love life–which appeared to her in cat litter and raisin bran cereal–that led her to book a dinner for K. O. and Wynn to get them together. Why read tea leaves when you can see the future in cat feces?
I detected an inaccuracy when the nieces’ hamster gets loose and once it is sighted, K. O. asked:
“Does Freddy have a brown tail and happen to be a little chubby?”
Hamsters do not have tails like mice or rats. Their tails are short stubs and would not even be a feature one would notice should a hamster cross one’s path.