So after reading Gideon’s Gift and Sarah’s Song, of course I ploughed right into this book simply so I could spell plough the British way yet again. Also, what better time to finish the set than when rushing through them all at once (Heigh, Brian, how’s the ‘Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies’ series coming? you ask, and I salute you for your British spellings as well as I avoid the question).
This book is better than the previously mentioned books because they don’t have a wrapper prologue nor, really, a bifurcated story, although some of it is told in flashback, but not a whole lot. The titular Hannah is a freshman in an exclusive high school in Washington, D.C., who keeps very busy with extracurricular activities because her parents are away for most of the year–her father, a former Senator, is the ambassador to Sweden and her mother is quite the social butterfly. Hannah lives with her maternal grandmother in a big house and does not have much in terms of companionship outside of those activities. Her driver, though, prays for Hannah all the time, and when he asks her for what he should pray for, she asks for a Christmas miracle–and later, when her parents tell her they won’t be home for Christmas, she narrows her miracle into hoping her parents will be home for Christmas. To take her mind off of the daughter’s loneliness and to keep her from pestering them during the party season in Sweden, the mother reveals a secret: the ambassador is not her real dad–the mother had been with a surfer type out in California in her salad days before returning home with a 4-year-old daughter to marry into her position in society. So Hannah reaches out to Congressmen and the press to help find her father who enlisted in the Army a decade ago and might be in Iraq. He is, but he’s going on One Last Mission, a dangerous one, because the other helicopter pilots have wives and families. So there’s a bit of tension as to whether he will Make It Home Alive, much less in time for Christmas (and the mother jets back from Sweden to quell the noise her daughter has made).
So it was a more straightforward narrative without the double-effect, the half-the-story-in-flashback, method used by the other two books I read. It did have some head scratchers that made me go, “Really?” like the fact that the mother brought the box of mementoes from her California fling to Sweden with her instead of leaving it in the mansion which was their pied-à-terre in the United States–ah, well, it served to move the plot, such as it was, along.
The best of the three I read and more on par with a traditional Christmas novel. No real unreal ending where the mother and the biological father rediscover their passion for one another–that would be a different kind of book, ainna?–but still the best of the lot (unless the second in the series was the best).
So now I have most of the month of December left. Will I read a Christmas novel by a different author? Can I even find one in the stacks even though I stock up on them through the year? Stay tuned!
