The December Market by RaeAnne Thayne was published last year and my hold for it did not come available until February of this year, so I passed on reading it, as I had no desire to read a Christmas novel two months after Christmas. This was my second Thayne Christmas novel and it was not as good as Coming Home for Christmas, as it suffered the reader to endure the tritest clichés, the worst of all being loquaciously hypersensitive children. I cannot abide children who are portrayed as wise beyond their years yet because of their youth have no knowledge of the wisdom they impart.
For a Christmas novel, tragedy factors heavily in all the major characters’ backstories. Amanda Taylor lost the love of her life in a motorcyle accident and Rafe Arredondo lost his wife to addiction and a later overdose. Amanda’s father also killed four people while driving drunk, so although she was innocent of the crimes of her father, people avoided her and treated her like a pariah. And just before Christmas, Amanda’s grandmother Birdie and Rafe’s grandfather Paolo are injured in a car accident.
Amanda has put all her efforts into establishing a successful business and taken on more projects than most people can deal with, such as managing the annual December market in town. If she has so much to concentrate on then she will not have any time to dwell on the past tragedies in her life, especially at Christmas. Rafe, a paramedic and firefighter, enters the picture with his motormouth son Isaac. Rafe injures himself while rescuing a woman from a fire and Amanda does a good deed by bringing him some prepared meals. Rafe has a Superman complex, however, and in spite of having one arm in a cast he still manages to do everything he was able to with two functioning arms.
Isaac attaches himself to Amanda and treats her as a mother figure. He asks Santa if Amanda could be his new mother for Christmas, which is so clichéd I could only roll my eyes at the lack of originality and maudlin sentimentality. Naturally, Amanda and Rafe come together at the end of the novel. I have only read two Thayne Christmas novels yet this one was a dud.
I was reading this novel on the eleventh anniversary of my mother’s death and I was struck cold when I encountered the following passage, about Amanda’s late boyfriend Jake:
“Holly frowned. ‘That’s not what I meant and you know it. I was talking about Jake. We’re close to the anniversary of his death. It’s been, what? Eleven years now?'”