Let It Snow by Nancy Thayer [1] centred on Christina Antonioni, the owner of a toy store on Nantucket. Just before Christmas she and the other merchants around the harbour discover that their landlord is upping the rent by 10%. None of them are able to afford it and are afraid they will all be out of business in the new year. Can Christina save the charming Nantucket waterfront businesses in time for the holidays?
The inside flap referred to the rent increase plotline yet we don’t read about it until we are already one third into the novel. Until then we deal mostly with the relationship Christina develops with nine-year-old Wink, a girl whom Christina confronts trying to shoplift. The two eventually develop a friendship while Wink helps out a few hours in the store. The two bond quickly and it is no wonder, as Wink is starved for attention as her own mother, Delia, is a snobbish fashionista dealing with an upcoming divorce from Wink’s father. Wink needs an older female figure in her life and Christina fulfills that role. A romantic interest enters the picture when Christina meets Andy, Delia’s brother.
The Scrooge who wants the rent increase is Oscar Bittlesman, who happens to be Delia and Andy’s father and thus Wink’s grandfather. He has no reservations about turfing every shopkeeper out as his only quest is to make more money. During a meeting with Christina, he yells at Wink and she is so upset that she runs away, and there is an effort to find her. Oscar’s outbursts are frequently excused by his children, saying, as Andy does unconvincingly, that “He’s getting old and losing control.” My goodness–Oscar is only 65 years old and we know that he is in fine physical health. His children make it seem as if he is dealing with dementia and has serious anger issues, but Oscar is not as bad as that.
Christina comes up with an idiotic challenge to Oscar where, if he loses, he won’t impose the rent increase. Yet when he wins, the shopkeepers and Christina then devise a plan to tug at Oscar’s heartstrings to get him to change his mind. Both schemes seemed so implausible and sickly sweet that I was never on tenterhooks wondering which way things would turn out.
Romance is in the air because by the novel’s end, Delia and her husband have called off their divorce and Andy proposes to Christina. And the rent increase? Cancelled when Oscar discovers the wooden sheds aren’t even worth what he’s charging them all, so he reduces their rent by 20%! What an eye-rolling tsk way to end the novel.
[1] I am a stickler for accuracy when recording the titles and authors’ names in my reviews and will use whatever forms have been rendered on the formal title page (see the Finnish Way as an example; nowhere inside that book was the lead definite article spelled with a capital T). However I hemmed and hawed a great deal over Let It Snow by Nancy Thayer. The full title page, the half-title page, the cover and spine all represent the book title entirely in lowercase. The author’s name is also in lowercase. Therefore should I refer to the book and its author within my review by recording each of them without a capital letter in sight? It would look ridiculous, but it would be accurate. Yet when I read the acknowledgements, Thayer referred to her own novel as Let It Snow. The author herself does not have a reputation such as bell hooks for writing her own name in lowercase, although it is often stylized on her book covers as such. I had no such quandary when writing the review for An Island Christmas. In that Thayer novel, both the title and author’s name were rendered in lowercase on the front cover, but the full title page spelled the title out as An Island Christmas and the author’s name was written all in capitals. Whenever I encounter names or titles rendered entirely in capitals, I follow the general rules for capitalization. Yet if they’re all in lowercase I rule on the side of stylization. However I have decided to eschew the all-lowercase representations for Let It Snow and its author.