As soon as I started reading The Christmas Wish by Lindsey Kelk, I felt as if I had been engaged with the story for many pages already. Whenever I start a new novel, I start off slow, learning about the characters and the situations they’re in. I take nothing at face value and am always turning back a few pages to reacquaint myself with the characters and their relationships with others and what they do. Kelk on the other hand had me dive right into her story and I felt as if I knew everyone already. I liked how easily I became immersed in the story.
And what a story it is. Gwen Baker is a lawyer who goes to her childhood home, where her parents still live, for Christmas. The big day ends in a disaster. She gets into an argument with her snooty older sister Cerys, who reveals the secret that Gwen had been hiding from everyone: she was (as good as) fired from her law firm for attacking a client. Gwen goes to bed, only to wake up not on Boxing Day, but on Christmas Day again. It was as if the dinnertime argument had never occurred. Gwen can’t understand what is going on, but it happens again and again. She goes to bed on Christmas night and wakes up…on Christmas morning. She relives the holiday ten times.
The back of the book described the story as “Then Gwen wakes up to discover it’s Christmas Day all over again. Like Groundhog Day but with eggnog. And family arguments. On repeat.”
While the start of chapter seven was a bit confusing, when Gwen woke up to her second Christmas morning, I soon realized what was going on and the characters’ references to “Groundhog Day” made sense (as did a later search on IMDb). Gwen was understandably frustrated about what was happening to her but learned to accept that everything that happened would pass as if it had never happened anyway, since a different Christmas Day would occur when she woke up the next morning.
Kelk populated the novel with so many references to pop culture, especially movies, that I could only nod and accept what I was reading. I rarely watch movies and know little if anything about the actors that star in them, so the cinematic allusions were lost on me, but not to the point where I didn’t understand the points Kelk wanted to make. That said, Kelk did misspell the name as Katherine [sic] Hepburn, an error I have encountered elsewhere.
Gwen is stuck in a Christmas time loop. She figures out that she can break out of it if she is able to fulfil the wish whichever family member made during the Christmas pudding sixpence tradition. Thus on each new Christmas Day she tries to do things like spend more time with her father, or help out at Christmas to give her overworked mother a break, or get along with her snobbish sister, or, according to the wish of her own grandmother, get back together with her old boyfriend Michael, whom everybody loved (except her).
The love story in the novel does not come from a reunited Gwen and Michael but from a crush she had been harbouring for twenty years over the nextdoor neighbour, Dev. A Christmas novel that deals with an unrequited crush and the fulfilment of a wish is not spoiled by the obvious: of course Gwen and Dev come together and Gwen can finally escape from her Christmas time loop.
Kelk’s descriptions at times caused me to break out in laughter. I liked this paragraph which told of the abilities of Gwen’s parents in holding their liquor:
“I cheered, Manny groaned and Dad laughed, all while Mum chugged her whisky in one gulp. She took great pride in being the strongest drinker in the house, not that it was much of a competition. Dad was under the table after a sniff of the barmaid’s apron, but Mum had the iron constitution of a particularly lairy ox, a trait I had sadly not inherited.”
And Gwen’s impression of her older sister Cerys:
“Do not fight with your sister, I reminded myself as my hands began to ball up into little fists. Her kids are weird, her husband is a frightful shithead and she can’t eat gluten. She already suffers.”
It is language like that which shows how I am diversifying my range of Christmas fiction. Having already dealt with oral sex and sex toys in The Christmas Tree Farm a week and a half ago, in The Christmas Wish I encountered yuletide dick pics and the sexual act of pegging. I had no foreknowledge that either would be in this book, but I went with the flow and ho ho ho.