I have a confession to make.
I love dumb Lifetime movies. I love the Christmas season for the lights and the chocolate (maybe family too), but I really love it for all the dumb Lifetime holiday movies.
They have everything: hokey re-creations of Beauty and the Beast, tales of ghosts in rural New England inns, fake fiancées, strangers kissing in (usually broken) elevators, women in relationships with The Wrong Guy, time loops à la Groundhog Day, and nauseating renditions of favorite carols. I hate them. I love them. I speed through the sections my intelligence cannot bear to watch – but not too fast. Generally I find myself screaming at the television:
“BUT YOU’VE ONLY KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR – WHAT? – TWO WEEKS? TWO WEEKS!! AND YOU THINK YOU CAN GET MARRIED?! DOES HE HOG THE BED? YOU ALREADY KNOWS SHE SNORES BECAUSE YOU WATCHED HER SLEEP, YOU CREEP!! YOU’RE GOING TO RIP EACH OTHER TO SHREDS BEFORE YOU CAN SNEEZE THE WORD ‘SEQUEL’!!”
And then I remember that my apartment is absolutely sound-permeable. And that binging these movies may not be healthy, for my vocal chords if nothing else.
So instead, after consuming a nearly toxic quantity of soppy movies, I turn to the rich field of romance novels, like Mary Balogh’s A Christmas Promise. This one’s a classic String Puller (#17): the woman’s father arranges their marriage so that he knows she’ll be settled in someplace new when he dies of cancer (or something) in two weeks. This is a pretty bullshit reason to make your daughter marry a stranger, but understandable enough as a premise.
They get married, have some really weird sex (consensual but aggressive); they each think that the other married for shallow reasons, and that their partner is cold as ice. I had to edit this book several times in order to avoid the repetition of the word ‘arctic.’
There were some real Lifetime details folded into the book: two people who hate one another for the wrong reasons find themselves in the middle of a boisterous family Christmas; slowly they learn about each other – he’s not a degenerate gambler and she does have genuine emotions – and finally they drag themselves to love. There’s sledding, singing, bonfires, community spirit, family revelations, and a large number of subplots where other people pair off.
The story was not better or worse than one of my dumb movies, but it did have one advantage: it is much harder to yell at a book, because books don’t talk to you.
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