Overview
The Letter, the final book of the Christmas Box collection is, most simply stated, the love story of David and MaryAnne Parkin. But it is also everyone's love story, for it is about the storms that all relationships must face when the blissful state of romance vanishes into one of real-life challenges and difficulties. We often forget that it is in the hard times that we truly see what is best in love as well as in life. Though love may be temporarily darkened, true love never gives in, or up, but holds tight to noble ideas, which transcend this earth and all time.
The Letter is also about our pasts and our individual quests to discover who we are. In The Letter, David Parkin sets out on a journey to find his mother, a woman who abandoned him when he was a child. In truth, however, David is searching for himself as he seeks to free himself from the pain of her rejection and his fear that he was somehow unworthy of her love. In a sense, David's search is the same journey we are all pursuing. We are all seeking love.
My hope is that you will feel what I felt as I wrote this book -- the divine nature of loyalty and the understanding of why we must share love whenever and wherever.
One final note. I am saddened to finish the Christmas Box trilogy and to bid good-bye to the Parkin family. I do not know if I shall ever visit them again, but I am glad for this last story -- a story which I think is a fitting sendoff for the characters I've grown to love. I hope that the message you find in their lives is meaningful to your own. And, most of all, that in reading the Christmas Box collection, you, and those with whom you share my books, will never be the same.
With my love, Richard Paul Evans
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Set in Salt Lake City during the Depression, this overwritten, tear-jerking tale of personal redemption returns to the characters Evans introduced in his bestseller The Christmas Box. Twenty years have passed since the death of David and MaryAnne Parkin's three-year-old daughter, Andrea. David has maintained an unvarying stoicism about Andrea's death, shutting out MaryAnne, who finally rebels against her emotional limbo and leaves him. Feeling thrice abandoned by the women in his life (first by his mother, Rose, when he was six, then by his daughter, now by his wife), David reads an unsigned letter in Rose's hand that MaryAnne had discovered at the foot of Andrea's grave. Immediately, he decides that finding his mother will lead him to the answers he craves. Through his quest, David confronts poverty, racism, personal demons and the temptation of new love. By striving to understand his feelings for his mother, David is able to reconcile his grief for his daughter and renew his love for MaryAnne. Evans again offers a surplus of melodrama and flowery prose, further undermined by one-dimensional characters and contrived situations. Readers who crave a huge dose of sentimentality, however, will be touched by this exhortation to moral strength in the face of tragedy. Simultaneous audio; author tour. (Oct.)Library Journal
Aiming to duplicate the sugary success of The Christmas Box and Timepiece (which jointly have 5.5 million copies in print), Evans brings back David and MaryAnne Parkin, whose daughter died 19 years ago. A letter left at her grave suggests that David's biological mother is trying to make contact.Kirkus Reviews
Third in Evans's mega-successful and ditto sentimental saga (The Christmas Box, 1995; The Timepiece, 1996) about the good David and MaryAnne Parkin of Salt Lake.The action starts in 1933, twenty years after the couple's beloved three-year-old daughter, Andrea, died. It seems that the affluent David, in his grief, has grown guarded in his love for MaryAnne, has built "walls around his heart," a failing the reader needs to take pretty much on faith, since David remains insufficiently three-dimensional for much dramatic evidence to emerge. It must be true, though, because MaryAnne has had it up to here: in fact she's about to leave forever, under guise of going to a brother's wedding in England. Once she's gone and he finds her Dear John letter, David—well, he falls very low indeed. Why, though, did his daughter's death hit him so hard? Might it have to do with his own mother's abandonment of him—for showbiz—when he was only five? And might she, though thought dead, be the same who recently left another letter, this one on Andrea's grave? To try to allay his psychological ghosts, David goes to Depression-era Chicago to dig up what he can about his mother's life in the theaters there—an expedition that fills the book's center, may be its most involving section, leads David to an "insight," and is ended suddenly when, back home, his dear old Negro friend, Lawrence Flake, has a stroke. David's return and Lawrence's illness will bring about a revelation, a reversal, a battle between good and evil, and two deathbed scenes, one more mawkish than the other, each extended deliciously by the absence of modern medicine.
Evans's world of the angelic and the satanic, of homily, sermonette, and deep thoughts, is brought—in his usual rickety, jerry-built fashion—to life once again. Whatever your reaction may be to melodrama, read it and weep.