I received a complimentary copy of this book for an honest review.

Once Upon a Christmas Carol
by
Melody Carlson

| Description

• Romantic Christian Fiction

Because Carol grew up in a dysfunctional home with too many dashed childhood expectations, including at Christmastime—the holiday season is now something she’d rather avoid. So, this year her goal is to flee to the Bahamas and to vacation by herself until Christmas is over. Bah humbug! But bad weather redirects her flight to blustery Michigan, where she gets stuck on her aunt’s farm and discovers a different kind of Christmas: one wrapped in love, family, and holiday spirit.

| My Thoughts

I heard about this ChristFic Christmas novella in an announcement from the publisher, saying the book is for fans of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and describing the heroine as “a modern-day Scrooge.” Because I so enjoyed reading that classic before, and because Scrooge (1951) is one of my all-time favorite films, I decided to give Once Upon a Christmas Carol a try.

In case you suddenly need an iconic scene from the middle of 1951’s Scrooge—here ya’ go!

Bah…Humbug?

Despite Once Upon’s title, though, I didn’t really find the story to have much in common with Dickens’s classic, plot wise. And simply preferring to avoid Christmas because of some bad holiday experiences in the past doesn’t make someone a selfish, miserly, cold-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge, character wise. Carol isn’t like that.

Once Upon just seems more like a regular Hallmark-Christmassy tale, which would have been fine on its own. But admittedly, certain aspects of this specific read didn’t work for me.

The Single. The Married. And the Divorced.

The older I get, the more I believe that it’s perfectly possible to appreciate and to celebrate romance and marriage without putting down singleness.

Whether or not it’s intentional, I think some of the characters’ dialogue in this book sends a message that if someone has decided they’d rather be single at a certain time in their life (or for however long), something must be wrong with them, in one way or another. Or that the adults who are staying single these days must all be “afraid” of the alternative. That certainly isn’t the case across the board.

I didn’t exactly care for the way this story touches on the issue of divorce either—particularly, divorced people—but that’d be a lot to address further right now.

Triangle Trouble

I’ll also admit that when it comes to the prospective couple in a romantic read, it usually puts a damper on the story for me if one of those characters is currently involved with someone else. I tend not to relax into a story’s romantic development when one of the characters hasn’t ended (and had some quality time away from) their other romantic relationship.

It’s an added turn-off for me if that character starts showing signs of being unassertive and indecisive about the person they’re already involved with.

Then if the story starts to sink into rather teenage-ish love-triangle friction, that’s pretty much it for me.

More from This Author?

While this story didn’t turn out to be my cup of cocoa, I have enjoyed around five other Christmas novellas by this author before, including A Quilt for Christmas and A Royal Christmas.