Overview
Instead of nostalgia, Binchy evokes contemporary life; instead of Christmas homilies, she offers truth; and instead of sugarplums, she brings us the nourishment of holidays that precipitate change, growth, and new beginnings. The stories in This Year It Will Be Different powerfully evoke many lives - step-families grappling with exes, long-married couples faced with in-law problems, a wandering husband choosing between "the other woman" and his wife, a child caught in grown-up tugs-of-war - during the one holiday when feelings cannot be easily hidden.Synopsis
From the New York Times bestselling author of Circle of Friends, The Glass Lake, and Evening Class comes a stunning collection of fifteen Christmas stories filled with Maeve Binchy's trademark wit, charm, and sheer storytelling genius. In "A Typical Irish Christmas," a grieving widower heads for a holiday in Ireland and finds an unexpected destination not just for himself, but for a father and daughter in crisis. . . . In "Pulling Together," a teacher not yet out of her twenties sees her affair with a married man at a turning point as Christmas Eve approaches. . . . And in the title story, "This Year It Will Be Different," a woman with a complacent husband and grown children enters a season that will forever alter her life, and theirs. . .
These stories, and a dozen more, powerfully evoke many lives—from step-families grappling with exes to children caught in grown-up tugs-of-war—during the one holiday when feelings cannot be easily hidden. The time of year may be magical, imbued with meaning. But the situations are timeless. And Maeve Binchy makes us care about them all.
Publishers Weekly
That Binchy (Circle of Friends) would choose to enter the Christmas market should not be a surprise. Her wide audience enjoys the warmth of her fiction, the emphasis on the power of love to transform ordinary lives even as she acknowledges that for some people, love is elusive or the prelude to frustration and heartbreak. Here she presents 15 short stories that take place during the holiday season; all display her deft rendering of family relationships and the stresses of contemporary life. Unfortunately, however, these tales are formulaic and superficial. We meet women unable to spend Christmas with their married men, children from broken homes, aged parents for whom Christmas is an ordeal rather than a pleasure, couples trying to resolve the past, lonely souls looking for a future. Several stories feature second wives whose husbands are oblivious to the machinations of their (always beautiful but selfish) first spouses. While the characters and their predicaments are potentially interesting, as soon as her narratives begin to develop, Binchy catapults forward to disappointingly simplistic endings. Readers will yearn for more: more character development, more detail, less fast-forwarding, fewer perky or maudlin conclusions. These tales are fine for a fast read during a busy season, but many will wish that Binchy had instead developed one of them into a novel that would do justice to her characters and themes. (Nov.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
That Binchy (Circle of Friends) would choose to enter the Christmas market should not be a surprise. Her wide audience enjoys the warmth of her fiction, the emphasis on the power of love to transform ordinary lives even as she acknowledges that for some people, love is elusive or the prelude to frustration and heartbreak. Here she presents 15 short stories that take place during the holiday season; all display her deft rendering of family relationships and the stresses of contemporary life. Unfortunately, however, these tales are formulaic and superficial. We meet women unable to spend Christmas with their married men, children from broken homes, aged parents for whom Christmas is an ordeal rather than a pleasure, couples trying to resolve the past, lonely souls looking for a future. Several stories feature second wives whose husbands are oblivious to the machinations of their (always beautiful but selfish) first spouses. While the characters and their predicaments are potentially interesting, as soon as her narratives begin to develop, Binchy catapults forward to disappointingly simplistic endings. Readers will yearn for more: more character development, more detail, less fast-forwarding, fewer perky or maudlin conclusions. These tales are fine for a fast read during a busy season, but many will wish that Binchy had instead developed one of them into a novel that would do justice to her characters and themes. (Nov.)Library Journal
Stories from the beloved Irish author.Kirkus Reviews
A collection of Christmas-centered feel-good tales about love and family snarls in the season of comfort and joy. All are rendered in Binchy's popular unglossed style (The Glass Lake, 1995, etc.), and set in England, Ireland, and Australia.Some of the 15 tales have to do with unwise, innocent women carrying torches for the married lovers who take them for granted. Most eventually find the strength to douse the torch they've been carrying and let their own light shine—one is helped along by the plight of a loveless teenager and a sad gambler who's lost all. There are also abrasive relationships with children. In "The First Step of Christmas," a resentful, neglected stepdaughter is lured home by a simple holiday tradition. Two single men with wayward adult children find mutual support and insight in "A Typical Irish Christmas," and two singles in their 50s fly to Australia to meet their children's spouses for the first time—and discover each other along the way. Included as well are amusing tales about ditsy-to-just-plain-awful grannies. In "A Season of Fuss," adult children foolishly try to curb their mother's towering nervous flights of preparation for the holidays. In "The Best Inn in Town," two crazy grandmothers—one with "a lip that curled all on its own," the other possessing "a tinkling laugh that would freeze the blood"—are about to be dumped in a local inn. But the grandchildren, used to "the natural order of things" at Christmastime, have a better idea. There are marital reconciliations, too, and, in the sourly amusing title story, a long-suffering housewife, a good old reliable preparer and supplier of Christmas jollity, plans a surprise for her dense family that will resonate far beyond Christmas.
In all, an appropriate gift for the casual reader—a bit of sentimentality and a touch of romance, along with humor and hopeful turns to treat those with cases of the holiday blues.