A Family Gets More Than They Bargained For Selling Christmas Trees in NYC

-

At first glance Bright Lights, Big Christmas by Mary Kay Andrews might look like a typical flavor of the month romance. It was one of three books selected by the Goodreads Kindle Book Club Forum for December, and when checking this 9/26/23 released novel, I found it had been widely read with 4,338 ratings on Amazon and 23,072 ratings on Goodreads. When I first listened to the Audible sample, it grabbed me from the beginning: a family Christmas tree farm had a spring freeze that killed a number of trees, the patriarch  just had a heart attack and his ex wife was caring for him because his current wife dumped him as being a nurse wasn’t compatible with her vision of the future, but the surviving trees needed to be taken up to NYC imminently as they did every year for the big Christmas tree selling season, and this year the future of the farm depended on the income from their trees.  

It is up to brother Murphy and his little sister Kelly to take charge of the NYC sales this year, living in the family’s old camper on site in NYC with the trees, and trying to mitigate the year’s financial damage to the North Carolina farm through the hoped success of their sales. Since her brother Murphy’s driving the semi with trees up north, it’s Kelly’s job to tow the camper with her dad’s truck, “…the rusting 1982 Ford F-150 with the vintage fifteen-foot travel trailer hooked up behind it. Like the pickup, the trailer had seen better days. The teardrop-shaped body with faded two-tone turquoise-and-white paint looked like a discarded canned ham.” Kelly’s been treading water in North Carolina as the trained artist is currently between jobs. After a merger at the Atlanta ad firm, her art director position was deemed “redundant.” Although she’s been living off her separation payment, she could see her bank account dwindling.

It turns out, although romance is part of the plot line, there are many other things going on. A 6 year old boy Austin, whose parents divorced a year earlier, loves Kelly’s tree selling older brother Murphy, his dog Queenie, and their old camper, while his divorced dad develops a fondness for Kelly. There’s a competing tree selling outfit that gets territorial with them, among other things. They meet quite a cast of locals, and some we get to know better than others; readers feel like they’re part of the community, as members look out for each other. Concerns rise when an elderly man befriended by Kelly develops a bad cough, and is suddenly missing. No one knows his full name, or has any idea of his address. The narrative seems very authentic and keeps readers’ interest for the whole book. I teared up a little at the end when Christmas gifts are shared, but the happy ending is a feel good send off! I thoroughly enjoyed this book. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spend a Year Walkng in Stanley Tucci’s Shoes

-
What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci is an interesting, light, humorous, and witty read for anyone interested in cooking, good food, restaurants, acting and actors, what Tucci’s daily business and family life is like, and what the heck is going on with his wife Felicity Blunt who Tucci portrays constantly throughout the book as potentially engaging in affairs, which I’m sure is just a humorous device of some kind. You couldn’t help noticing everytime he mentions where she’s off to, there is a tongue in cheek sarcastic suggestion that other men may be involved, throughout the entire book, yet they pair beautifully in the kitchen, and he makes the point, “Time cooking with someone you love is time well spent.” Before this book I was reading Richard Osman’s latest, We Solve Murders, and struggling to get through which I didn’t expect as I’ve loved previous books he’d written. I found it very different from his books in the Thursday Murder Club series. Tucci’s book by comparison was a v...
Read more

The Wager is a Safe Bet As A Gripping Book About Life, Death, and Adventure on an 18th Century British Warship

-
The Wager by David Grann is the poster book for “Truth is stranger than fiction;” this  narrative nonfiction book is a story about a crew of men and boys with ages spanning from 80 years (a cook) to adolescence, who work on the British 18th century ship HMS Wager in 1741. They are sent on a secret Naval mission with a squadron of other ships to destroy any Spanish vessels along the way toward South America and the Pacific Ocean (they were at war with Spain), and also try to locate and commandeer a legendary Spanish treasure ship. Author David Grann had access to “archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the half-truthful journals, and the surviving records from the troubling court-martial”(Kindle book blurb). This book is like a runaway train I didn’t want to leave. It is gripping and not easily put down.  I posted several passages from this book on social media, prompting a friend to ask if it was similar to William Golding’s book Lord of the Fl...
Read more

A Plot to Capture the American Zeitgeist

-
Image
Amazon’s book blurb for The Everglades by Louis Berry says this about it, “…a chilling saga unfolds where the pristine wilderness of Florida’s Everglades masks a sinister legacy of evil. In 1945, two Nazi war criminals, General Reinhard Hochstuhl and Colonel Wilhelm Von Unterscheisse , infiltrate 1945 Miami via a covert U-boat landing, seeding a multi-generational plot to subvert American society.” Berry writes, “No one in Miami was aware of the German U-Boat five hundred yards offshore; south of Flamingo Point . The ship operated within rat-lines moving high-valued Nazis to safety across the globe…Orders were to assimilate. Approach was to erode each generation’s connection to God. Free of dogmatic German machinery, lies became subtle; directed at influencing beliefs Americans held dear. Eliminating God from the collective consciousness was best accomplished across generations. The men knew they must find wives sympathetic to the Fatherland’s cause of world dom...
Read more