Title: Lizzie’s Christmas Escape
Author: Christine Barlow
Series: n/a
good writing telling a terrible tale
I’d like to thank Christine Barlow, Bookouture, and Zaffre Publishing for allowing me to read this novel in exchange for an honest review.
Lizzie Stevens is bored and lonely. Married and pregnant by nineteen, she settled into life as a mum and housewife, forsaking her ambitions as a seamstress. Her two daughters are grown and gone to college, and her husband has a daily routine that doesn’t include telling her he loves or appreciates her. She decides something needs to change. But before she can decide exactly how to go about changing her life, a handsome stranger moves in across the street. He bathes her in attention and affection, and Lizzie begins to fall in love with him. Yet a nagging doubt inside her insists something isn’t right…
Well. I’m not sure how to feel about this book. I want to give a disclaimer right now: my only experience with marriage is what I have read and observed in others, so I’m no authority on marital relations… Everything that follows is my subjective opinion.
Everything I’ve ever heard about marriage—and relationships in general, really—stressed that communication is key. TALK to one another. Nothing is ever resolved without communication. Therefore, I have a very hard time feeling sorry for Lizzie, because from the way I understood the story, she never once tried to talk to Henry about how she was feeling. She might have attempted a couple of passive-aggressive moves, like buying lingerie and trying to tempt him into bed, but another thing I’ve always heard about relationships—men don’t get subtlety. If it isn’t spelled out for them in black and white, they probably won’t pick up on it. They appreciate directness and practicality, so it doesn’t surprise me that Henry never picked up on her attempts or the extent of her unhappiness. I remember when I was a kid, my mom would get annoyed with my dad when he didn’t do what she wanted him to do, and he’d always tell her that he wasn’t a mind-reader. (They’re divorced now, by the way.) COMMUNICATION.
I’m also disinclined to like Lizzie because it never occurred to her—except maybe once, very briefly, toward the end when everything was blowing up in her face—that she wasn’t the only unhappy member of that household. She was so wrapped up in her own woe-is-me that she didn’t realize how terribly depressed her husband was. (That night she bought the lingerie and tried to tempt him, if she’d intended to do what I think she’d intended to do when she’d knelt down in front of his chair—THAT was a big red flag. If a guy’s turning down, er, servicing, something is very wrong.)
I did like Henry, though. We didn’t see much of him, and he seemed like a turd at first, but by god, once Abbie had opened his eyes and pointed out to him that he needed to do something to save his marriage, he didn’t hesitate to change his habits. He loved Lizzie, had never stopped loving her, and though he’d lost his way for a while, he got right back on track and wanted to make her happy. The poor guy was just in a little rut. He’d needed his wife to steal the remote, turn off the TV, and goad him into talking to her. Thank god for Abbie.
I’m not going anywhere near Marcus, so just know that he missed his calling in theatre. Abbie and Freya, Lizzie and Henry’s two daughters, were both kind and considerate children. Well, Abbie didn’t seem kind at first, but she was stressed out and anxious—and pregnant—which can make us all a little irritable, right? Leo seemed nice as well. As for Ann, Lizzie’s bestie…she seemed a little two-faced. One minute she was giggling and encouraging Lizzie to check out her hot new neighbor, then the next she was cautioning her to be careful what she wished for. She can’t have it both ways—either she approves of extra-marital affairs, or she doesn’t. And judging by the way she reacted to her husband’s…she doesn’t. So she should never have encouraged Lizzie to seek “adventure” elsewhere. Ann seemed like a good person, a good friend, in general, but she didn’t give the best advice.
Speaking of Ann and her husband, Dave…my heart broke for them. Whether or not his affair was different or worse than Lizzie’s is a gray area, but in my personal opinion, his was worse. To have two-timed your wife, who you supposedly still adore, for ten years… I don’t feel bad for him. He can tell Ann he loves her, he can beg for forgiveness until the cows come home, but he had his chance to stop, to make things right, every minute of every day during those ten years, and by all appearances, he had no intentions of quitting his affair. He just happened to get caught. And how could he not have known where Ann and Lizzie were going away to? Isn’t that one of the first questions you ask when your wife says she’s going away for a few days? And he’d just left the brochure of the hotel where he was taking his mistress lying on the table? Baloney. If that was the kind of crap he pulled, either Ann was dense as a rock or he should have been caught a very long time ago. That whole situation smacks of convenience. Dave’s affair was a plot device intended, I assume, to show Lizzie how an affair hurts the cuckolded party. I’m not sure it was necessary, because she’d already begun having doubts and Marcus’ wife drove the point home. Poor Ann, used and abused.
All right, so I’ve torn apart the plot and the characters. As for the writing, it was quite good! Charming with an easy flow. If this writing had told a different story, I probably would have loved it. However, because it told the story it did, I have more issues. The title page describes the novel as a sparkling, feel-good Christmas romance. Not from where I’m standing, it’s not. It didn’t sparkle, nor did it make me feel good (until the very end when Lizzie and Henry finally COMMUNICATED), and I wouldn’t even call this a romance. It was all about Lizzie and her emotional journey. I believe that’s called women’s fiction. Just because she was wined and dined by Marcus and ended up reunited in love with her husband at the end does not make this a romance. A romance has a main plot that focuses on a relationship. Women’s fiction has a main plot that focuses on a woman’s life and relating it to the reader. This was the latter.
Overall, not my kind of story…but I’d be curious enough to look into the author’s other work.
