A Horticulturist's Holiday: Planting Kisses and Kindness

No holiday reading list is complete without a book from Jenny Bayliss.  Last year I enjoyed A Season of Second Chances, and the year before that The Twelve Dates of Christmas.  So when I found Bayliss' Meet Me Under the Mistletoe on Amazon, I was delighted.

When Elinor "Nory" Noel leaves her beloved secondhand London bookshop to attend her friends' wedding in her hometown, it's with mixed emotions.  The week-long celebration is being held in a castle and will put her back in the thick of her private school circle.  Nory attended the prestigious school on scholarship, and despite her bond with the seven students who helped shape her formative years, the disparity in their social standing has always made her feel a little bit less than.  What's more, she comes from a family of proud working-class tree farmers, and part of her has always felt that attending private school created distance between them.  Finally, Nory and her friends are mourning Tristan, whom they lost to suicide last year.  They knew that he suffered from depression, but didn't realize how deeply.  Nory, who has weathered her own bouts of mental instability, feels his absence keenly.  And then she falls into a wheelbarrow of manure and comes face to face with her frenemy, Isaac Malik.  

Isaac is the castle's head gardener.  He's also Nory's brother's best friend.  Yet although Isaac has nothing but disdain for Nory's wealthy pals, he's very taken with Nory.  And the feeling is mutual.  With their shared background in plants and love of reading, the two have a lot in common.  At one point, Nory defends her massive book collection by saying ' "Keeping books is not hoarding!  . . . It's protecting history.  The written word is the key to the secrets of this world and all the worlds that live in our minds." ' (Bayliss 202-203)  As their romance, ahem, blossoms, Isaac trusts Nory enough to tell her that his great-great-grandmother's employer stole her original artwork and passed it off as her own.  Impetuous and passionate about justice, Nory burns to right this wrong.  But Isaac is private and doesn't want help from Nory -- or her influential friends.  What happens next will determine if Nory and Isaac's relationship has the grit of a winter garden, or if it's as fragile as a summer rose.       

Meet Me Under the Mistletoe is so much more than a Christmas romance.  In Nory, Bayliss gives us a multi-dimensional heroine who's dealing with a lot.  Although festive and sometimes very funny, hers isn't a Hallmark world where conflict melts like chocolate chip cookies.  It's a hothouse of holiday expectations haunted by the mental health struggles that people face all year, but especially in December.  You can't help but want good things for Nory, a sensitive bibliophile caught between her roots and the dazzling world of privilege just out of reach.

I don't know about you, but I'll never look at mistletoe the same way again.