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In "A Typical Irish Christmas," a grieving New York widower heads for a holiday in Ireland and finds an unexpected destination not just for himself, but for a father and daughter at odds. The title story "This Year It Will Be Different" also delves into the emotions of a person at mid-life—a woman with a complacent husband and grown children who are entering a season that can forever alter her life, and theirs. 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 she may be off on a new direction with some unusual friends. And in the delightful tale "The Hard Core," the four most recalcitrant residents of a nursing home are left alone at Christmas with the owner's daughter in charge: the result is sure to be disaster—or the kind of life-affirming renewal that only the spirit of the season can bring.
The stories in This Year It Will Be Different powerfully evoke many lives—step-families grappling with ex's, 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. The time of year may be magical, imbued with meaning. But the situations are universal. And Maeve Binchy makes us care about them all. As the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, "Maeve Binchy's people come to life fully. They make you laugh and cry and disturb your sleep." They do precisely that in this extraordinary collection, on the night before Christmas when we are snug in our beds, or anywhere, any time of the year.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 4, 2007 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780440337669
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780440337669
- File size: 2321 KB
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- Lexile® Measure: 920
- Text Difficulty: 4-5
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Reviews
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November 4, 1996
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.
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