The hammering at the front door comes after dark, in the worst storm anyone in that corner of Vermont can remember, and Mabel answers it holding a broom. She has spent eight years discouraging visitors. Through the bay window she sees a tall man coated in snow and, clutching his coat, a small figure, and for one dizzy second she lets herself believe the child is someone she has been waiting for. Then a woman carrying a second child steps into view, and the hope goes out of her face. The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan opens on that small collapse, and the rest of the novel is about what it takes for a frightened person to keep a door open.
The strangers are Brooke, Matt and their two daughters, flown in from London and bound for Brooke’s parents an hour away. Another car soon crashes into theirs and delivers two more: Izzy, who stages houses for sale, and Jason, who photographs them. Mabel has a stocked freezer, four black cats and no tree. She also has a turkey in the fridge, a huge one, which she tells her guests is a seasonal treat for the cats. It is the first lie of the book, and the gentlest.
Mabel’s Best Christmas Ever Begins in Silence
Mabel is the secret engine of The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan, and her secret is that she wrote the Careless Witch books, the picture-book series about a hapless witch that Brooke loved as a girl and now reads to her own children. She gave the witch her own crooked nose and odd eyes as a private joke decades ago, and eight-year-old Elsie spots the likeness on the doorstep. Morgan is very good on what fame did to a shy woman who drew at her kitchen table: the coach tours, the journalist who staged an accident to get through her gate, the readers who believed they owned her characters.
The real subject, though, is creative silence after grief. Mabel stopped writing when her husband Walter died, and the house is full of him: the curved shelves and window seat he built one summer in the turret, the glass-roofed library, the waterproof coat still hanging in the mudroom, which she lends to a stranger on the first night and then holds a little too long when he brings it back. The novel never makes a speech about loss. It lets objects do the work.
The return of her imagination is handled with lovely specificity. It starts with a child’s objection at the dinner table and a few silly rhyming lines that arrive unbidden, then a sketchbook dug out of a drawer, then a story begun with Elsie at the kitchen table. That sequence is the best thing The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan does, because it shows a gift returning in small, slightly embarrassing pieces rather than in a single moment of inspiration.
The Strangers Bring Their Own Weather
Morgan rotates the point of view between Mabel, Brooke and Izzy, and the three strands are designed to rhyme. Brooke is a planner who cannot stop trying to please her mother; Izzy is the cheerful one who learned young that no one would look after her. Izzy’s history arrives through a book: her mother bought her a copy of the Thanksgiving story from the witch series, and her father later gave it away to a church sale along with her night-light. When she pulls the same title off Mabel’s shelf, the scene is quietly devastating.
The romance between Izzy and Jason is the lightest of the three threads, and the book knows it. It is pleasant, the forced sharing of a turret bedroom is played for comedy, and Jason is decent company. The more interesting couple is Brooke and Matt, who are already married and simply need to talk. Their scenes, whispered in a bathroom so as not to wake the children, are one of the rare portraits in holiday fiction of a solid marriage under ordinary strain, and Matt’s dry jokes about British weather are a reliable pleasure. The two girls, meanwhile, are written with real affection and a good ear: Poppy cannot stop twirling, and Elsie hears everything the grown-ups would rather she had not, then repeats it at the worst possible moment. Their questions keep The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan honest whenever the adults start to explain themselves too neatly.
What the Best Christmas Ever Smooths Over
The weaknesses of The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan are the ones the genre tends to forgive, but they are worth naming. The plot leans on convenience. Objects turn up exactly when they are needed, and the key emotional prompts in Mabel’s story come from an eight-year-old who is wiser than any child has a right to be. By the final chapters every adult in the house has learned a version of the same lesson about letting go of the people they love, and the repetition gives the book a faintly instructive air.
Mabel’s estrangement is also told almost entirely from her side. That is a defensible choice for a novel about her, but it means the other person in the story stays a sketch, and the resolution feels easier than the long silence that preceded it. Readers who come to Christmas fiction for comfort will not mind. Readers who want the hard conversation on the page will notice it is missing.
The novel deals throughout with widowhood, childhood bereavement, parental neglect, serious childhood illness and a family estrangement lasting years, all handled gently and without graphic detail, and its romance stays behind a closed door.
The Novelist Behind the Snowbound House
Morgan lives near London and has sold more than twenty-five million books, and a Christmas novel has become something close to an annual event in her career, with The Christmas Book Club and The Christmas Cottage among the recent ones. Her acknowledgements suggest that a well-known independent bookshop in Vermont helped inspire the store Brooke’s parents run, which explains why the fictional shop and its story-time readings feel so lived in.
The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan is sadder and more reflective than her lighter fake-relationship comedy A Merry Little Lie, and it pairs well with Jenny Colgan’s The Christmas Book Hunt, a shorter seasonal story in which the search for a rare book draws a family back together.
Where It Leaves You
The book’s title belongs to a four-year-old, who announces it over chicken pot pie a moment before the lights go out. The joke is that she turns out to be right, more or less, and the novel earns the claim through small things: a lent coat, a pencil that starts moving again, a library full of strangers watching the snow.
The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan is out now, a generous, carefully built holiday novel whose ending is softer than its middle. It is best read slowly, with the radio forecasting snow.