Make the Season Bright

I really tried to come up with a good intro here. Something pulled from my life, that would seem authentic and genuine yet also relatable, generalizable perhaps, so that you, the reader, could see yourself in the anecdote. I tried but I failed. I couldn't come up with two things to jam together that might – on paper – seem good, but in reality just don't work for me and, if we're being honest, probably shouldn't be put together at all.

Ashley Herring Blake, by contrast, does not suffer from this problem.

I noted it in my perhaps slightly vitriolic review of Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail (my head-canon headline for which is "Astrid Parker is kind of a bitch"), where the titular character, Astrid, brings almost nothing positive to the relationship with the other main, Jordan, and is in fact actively detrimental in several ways. (I'm still so salty that Jordan settled I didn't even need to reread the review to remember her name.)

But then I picked up Make the Season Bright, got about halfway through (where we get the full, tragic backstory), and thought to myself, well, shit, she did it again.

It feels extremely weird for me to complain about happy endings. At this point in my senescence, I will barely tolerate any media that dares to end on any but an uplifting note. I am too old and too depressed on my own to need the issues of fictional people weighing me down, regardless of what screen size they dance into my life upon (movie, TV or phone).

And yet, here we are.

The book contains all the right bits. There's the improbable-verging-on-the-impossible reunion, the re-meet-cute that reminds them both of what they once had and what they're missing, and even a bordering-on-unbelievable number of queer side characters to round out the cast. But it just doesn't gel right, largely because the reason these two separated in the first place (and how) was ... correct? And nothing in the intervening years has changed their fundamental realities or the underpinnings of their issues.

So I was left just feeling off. I don't want to be rooting against the two romantic leads, but I also don't think any good can come of it, even if the book tries desperately to convince me otherwise. Sure, maybe one or both of the characters will have a total personality transplant and all their issues will be magically resolved, but that honestly just speaks even worse of the book?

To me, a good redemption romance arc marks itself not by the fact they wind up together at the end, but shows how they got there. Start with people with flaws (or flawed people), then show they grow and mature and overcome those flaws. Maybe I've just been ruined by On the Same Page, but that book shows how it can be done (and done very, very well). Bright, by contrast, settles for "well, they decided they'll be better about it so they are."

Is "reluctantly recommend" a thing? I'd definitely recommend it above Astrid, but only if you really need a Christmas story and don't have any other, better options.