The Wishing Bridge

The Wishing Bridge by Viola Shipman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Henri Wegner grew up a beloved child in Frankenmuth, Michigan, helped her father plan and execute his dream of opening the world's largest Christmas store, and then moved to Detroit to live her own dream of going to business school. She couldn't wait to leave behind small-town life and her childhood sweetheart. Fast forward a few decades, and the company she has worked for since graduating is now run by the son who inherited when his father died, and the son's a 2-dimensional stereotype of a greedy corporate shark. To save her job, she impulsively promises to convince her father to sell his now-famous, beloved store to a soulless company that will destroy it for profit. All she has to do is go home in December for the first time in years and betray her family to save a job she hates and doesn't really need or have strong ties to anymore.

*sighhhhhh* I wanted to like this book. It's a Hallmark Christmas movie in book form. Sadly, it is NOT one of the good Hallmark movies. There is no real conflict in this book, just a couple hundred pages of a grown woman agonizing over the world's most obvious choice.

This story is an identity crisis, and not in the way it intends (see above about the faux dilemma). Henri is introduced as being 52 years old, but the math on that doesn't work out, since based on the timeline of all the flashbacks, she had to be born in 1967, and the main part of the story has to take place now (2023) or thereabouts because of how the author refers to the COVID pandemic's effect on businesses in town. So Henri is actually 56. A 56-year-old woman with the angst and immaturity of a 26-year-old.

And that's, I think, really the problem. I LOVE finding stories centered on middle-aged characters, but this one doesn't feel authentic in the slightest. We are supposed to believe that Henri has lived and worked in the same place for *decades* and yet seems to have zero community? Her assistant is the closest thing she has to a friend in the city. There is no mention of anything that would in any way tie her to her current life--no friends or neighbors or former coworkers she keeps in contact with, no favorite restaurants or theatres, no faith community, no personality of any sort in her fancy, cold, uber-modern condo, and her work life is unbearably toxic. Apparently Henri has had the world's most routine, robotic life for the past 34 years, and we're supposed to believe this is in some way hard to give up to come home to a place she says she loves and feels loved, to take over management of a business she helped get started and still feels nostalgic for?

If Henri *had* been 26, I could buy that she was a workaholic driven by ambition and focused on her career to the exclusion of all else. I could believe that she was facing a quarter-life crisis and grappling with the realization that her life was going in the wrong direction. Actually, I could believe that of a 56-year-old if the circumstances of her life were different--multi-dimensional instead of a negative caricature of "Big City Life." It feels as though Henri was intended to be 26, but the author wanted to include all the nostalgia of life in the 1970s & 80s, which she couldn't do without making Henri a generation older. And it just doesn't work.

I did appreciate the nostalgic bits--I am old enough to have grown up with the excitement of those huge Wish Books at Christmastime that came from Sears and Montgomery Ward. However, I'm also old enough to know that NO ONE in 1975 was excited to get Star Wars figurines for Christmas, as is asserted in the opening of the book, because Star Wars didn't come out until 1977. That was just the first of several anachronisms.

One other thing really bugged me: toward the end, when Henri's boss & rival showed up at her family's store "unexpectedly" (it was telegraphed so hard...), Ms. Shipman describes the two of them sitting on the giant Santa throne in an "unchristian" way. I'm assuming she meant something akin to "lewd" or "x-rated," so the term raised my hackles. And then I snort-laughed at the implication that Christians don't have sex. Sure would be a lot fewer if that were true!

As with all Hallmark Christmas movies, there was supposed to be a romantic theme. Again, it would have worked quite well if the main characters had been 26 instead of 56. Or if they had spent more time getting to know the people they've grown into over the past 35 or so years since Henri broke Shep's heart, and IF the people they have become were actually a good fit. But that was pretty much glossed over, aside from Shep's newfound maturity a la post-divorce therapy. Nothing at all with the realities of single-sided step-parenting (which I can promise you is tricky!). I honestly think the most real character was Shep's ex-wife Hannah, who had done some major self-reflection and personal growth that Henri and her childhood BFF had not. Well, Sophie might have done a bit. All that is to say, the romance aspect of the book, which is usually my favorite part of a Hallmark Christmas movie, was both incidental to the main story and disappointingly paper thin.

For readers' advisors: I'm going with setting doorway as primary, for the descriptions of Frankenmuth and all its snowy businesses. There was no sex or violence, only a little swearing and a fair amount of drinking. Don't suggest this book to anyone who cares about complex, well-developed characters or a compelling plot, but it will probably appeal to readers who don't care about those things and just want to inhabit a Bavarian Christmas fantasy-land for a while. In that, it succeeds!

Nevertheless, I am very grateful to NetGalley and the publisher for the free eBook ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

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Nora Goes Off Script

Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Nora Hamilton makes a living writing screenplays for The Romance Channel (a thinly veiled Hallmark Channel), swapping out the details but keeping the essential fantasy romance elements intact. However, when her deadbeat husband leaves, she turns her personal story into a major Hollywood movie, earning enough (barely) to get herself and her kids out of the debt he left behind. The studio even pays extra to use her actual tea house/writing studio for the last two days of filming. However, when they pack up and leave, she discovers the leading man--famous actor Leo Vance--remained behind. He begs to be allowed to stay and rest in the tea house, offering her $1000/day in rent--money she badly needs to fix her gutters. She agrees, and suddenly she finds herself playing tour guide and shopping tutor for a gorgeous man eager to participate in her family's life. As he integrates into her world, their relationship evolves into a romantic one, but will he actually stay, or will he leave like her ex-husband did? Nora felt relief when her husband took off; she's very much afraid Leo's departure could shatter her heart.

I absolutely loved this book. It both pokes fun at the formulaic Hallmark movies we all love and love to hate, and also works within that same basic framework. Thankfully, this story is one of the good ones, not the ones with the plastic blonde (or brunette) attempting to pretend to be a regular person. I loved that Leo actually did seem like he could fit into Nora's world, and later she proved she could hold her own in his. Nora's daughter Bernadette seems a bit older than her 8 years, but 10-year-old Arthur is entirely believable. Plus it was a breath of fresh air to read a romance novel where the protagonists are 40-ish instead of 20-somethings.

I think this would be a great book to discuss in a book group. What makes a person stay with someone like Ben who has no observable redeeming qualities? Yet Nora endured almost two decades of his freeloading and emotional abuse until *he* decided to leave. Even if his absence is welcome, those years he was around were traumatic and left emotional scars, so how did that conditioning impact Nora and Leo's relationship, particularly after Leo flew to L.A. for the audition?

For readers' advisors: story doorway is primary, character secondary. All sex happens offscreen, and there are only a few well-placed swear words, so the book is nearly a "gentle read." No violence. All the characters seem to be heterosexual, and racial identity isn't indicated that I can recall, aside from a few names that indicate some secondary characters might be something other than white. Pretty much like the majority of the Hallmark movies, really. (Honestly, that's the biggest drawback--how hard would it have been to make the characters more diverse?)

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Bring on the Blessings

Bring on the Blessings by Beverly Jenkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bernadine Brown earned her $275 million the hard way: she divorced her cheating husband. After a year of traveling the world, she's feeling the need to find a purpose for her life, and when she hears of Henry Adams, an historically all-Black town in Kansas that is struggling financially and has put itself up for sale, Bernadine has her Aha! moment. In her younger years, Bernadine was a social worker, and those instincts never die. She buys the town with the goal of making it a haven for foster kids and their foster parents.

Trent July, mayor of Henry Adams, along with the other 51 voting residents of the town, assumes anyone rich enough to buy a whole town must be white, so the arrival of a well-dressed, middle-aged Black woman comes as a shock. They are stunned by her plan to rebuild the town and quickly find themselves caught up in a whirlwind of construction. Everyone except the former mayor is on board with the changes, and soon Bernadine and her new assistant, returned local Lily, are flying in her private jet to various cities around the country to pick up the five foster kids Bernie has chosen. The children range in age from six to fourteen and come with all kinds of emotional baggage but little in the way of material possessions. Bit by bit, day by day, the residents and the children bond and begin to heal.

This is a warm hug of a book, set in a Kansas summer. It's a story of second chances, starting over, and Found Family, of foster children and a community to raise them. I absolutely loved it. It's hopeful, it made me cry, and I adored the characters. I don't know why so many people have categorized it as either Christian or romance--it's only barely either one. Only the seven year old Devon Watkins is particularly religious, and although Trent and Lily work through their decades-old estrangement to rekindle their relationship, it's just a sub-plot, not at all the focus of the story. I think Riley and his enormous hog Cletus get nearly as much screen time.

What kept this book from getting a 5-star rating from me was the dire need for a copy editor. There were typos and missing or extra words, a wrong name in one spot, and they all jolted me momentarily out of the story until I could make the corrections in my head to determine what the sentences should have said.

For readers' advisors: character doorway is primary, setting & story secondary. A bit of swearing, a lot of flirting, some references to sex but nothing explicit. The only violence is perpetrated by the hog.

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