Book Report: A Knights Bridge Christmas by Carla Neggers (2015)

As you know, gentle reader, I like to read a Christmas novel around Christmas time, and I generally pick them up at various places throughout the year, maybe one or two a year (I bought this one in Arkansas this summer). But when they go into the Nogglestead to-read stacks, well, they’re often lost for a very long time and especially hide well during November and December. A couple of nights I went to the stacks specifically looking for a Christmas book and could not find one. So when we were preparing to go to ABC Books for a book signing, I told my beautiful wife that I hope Mrs. E. had Christmas books. At which point she swiveled in the chair she was sitting in and said, “What about this one?” This book was there all along!

At any rate, the book is one of a series which deals with the town of Knights Bridge, Massachussetts. A new librarian moves to town from Boston with her precocious and abnormally adult-like six year old son six years after the death of her husband in an automobile accident. She meets the hard-charging emergency room doctor grandson of a longtime Knights Bridge resident who has moved into an old folks’ home when the doctor returns to help with the grandmother’s move. She (the librarian) promises to help the doctor decorate the grandmother’s house one last time. Could they–fall in love?

C’mon, man, this is a holiday romance. That’s exactly what happens!

The book really has absolutely no conflict though. I mean, the townsfolk look down on the doctor a bit because they think he neglected his grandmother. The librarian wonders if she’s ready for the romance or if she would be just a conquest for the doctor who would leave her life forever. But it’s all unserious internal conflict that gets mentioned in the protagonists’ interior monologues fairly briefly. There’s no antagonist to speak of. Just some set pieces with a bit of idealized small-town Christmas season scenes and a bit of an underdeveloped back story about how the grandfather helped the great-grandfather get over his experiences in World War II, but….

Well, if you’re looking for a simple confection with holiday themes, here you go. It has less depth than most of the Christmas books I’ve read, and the six-year-old boy is really wise beyond his years.

So I’m not likely to charge out and get others in the series, but I am not the target audience anyway.