I started my Christmas reading with Coming Home for Christmas by RaeAnne Thayne. Thayne is a prolific romance writer and I saw her attractive book covers, especially her Christmas titles, when I worked at the library. This book was a find in a Little Free Library earlier this year. Unfortunately the cover does not live up to the reputation of her other books’ attractive Christmas covers.
Thayne was a more pleasurable read than Debbie Macomber, although I shouldn’t base that opinion on only one novel. By that I mean Thayne didn’t talk down to her women readership by having the female protagonists always falling for “bad boys” who used to bully them in school. In Coming Home for Christmas, we meet Elizabeth Hamilton, a young mother who abandoned her husband and two children seven years ago. Postpartum depression and suicidal thoughts compelled her to leave, for fear that she would do herself and her children harm. While having second thoughts she decided to return home, yet suffered a brain injury from a car accident and was in a coma for weeks. Upon recovery, she started a new life for herself, occasionally going back home to surreptitiously spy on her family, believing that they were better off without her. Leaving her family no information whatsoever of her whereabouts, her husband Luke could only wonder about her, and feared she may have committed suicide.
The story begins with Luke finally tracking her down in Oregon. With the Idaho authorities ready to arrest him for the disappearance and murder of his wife, Luke used local law enforcement to track her down in a last-ditch effort to clear his name. What better evidence to prove he wasn’t a murderer if he could produce the alleged victim in person?
With a storyline like that, I was immediately hooked. Thayne took her time to explain things, so some characters didn’t seem clear to me until a few chapters in. I never thought that she was negligent in filling in these backstories and was aware that these roles would eventually become clear. That only made me want to read more. I did struggle a bit at the beginning of the book in the relationship between Luke and Megan. They are technically stepsiblings yet referred to each other always as brother and sister. I had to flip back pages in order to clarify their relationship.
Since Elizabeth was living with a brain injury from the car accident, she was slow in her speech and Thayne wrote her dialogue by inserting ellipses between words. That was a distraction and I soon learned to ignore these breaks and read her dialogue without the intentional pauses.
When Elizabeth returns to the family her children take to her differently. Cassie, who is ten, struggles to deal with the mother who abandoned her. These feelings last for a year and involve some formal counselling. Thankfully, Thayne didn’t resolve this conflict in a literary version of a Brady Bunch half-hour. Bridger, who was an infant and was nearly killed in a mother-son murder-suicide pact, had no memories of her. Thayne wrote realistic dialogue for the children. I hate it when writers make their children speak like Confucius or smartasses. I was not familiar with the boy’s name Bridger and my eyesight interpreted the name, when I first saw it, as Bridget. Thus for the first few pages I was confused about Luke and Elizabeth’s children.
This is a Christmas love story and after his initial intention to divorce Elizabeth after clearing his name, Luke finds that he is falling for his wife all over again. This didn’t happen immediately, as Luke struggles with Elizabeth being back in his life. As Christmas approaches there is still uncertainty about whether or not they will remain together, but of course, as the pages come to an end and the calendar turns to December 25, they decide to make it work.