Title: Christmas Homecoming
Series: Christmas Angel
Author: L.A. Witt
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 79 Pages
Category: Historical, Holiday Romance
At a Glance: L.A. Witt did everything right in this story, from beginning to end.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: August 1939. Roger Miller and Jack O’Brien have been close since childhood. By the time they realize there’s more between them than friendship, Jack is leaving their sleepy Iowa town for college. But they console themselves knowing he’ll be home for Christmas. Right?
It is Christmas before they see each other again, but that Christmas comes six years and a world war later. Aged, beaten, and shaken by combat, they’re not the boys they were back then, but their feelings for each other are stronger than ever.
Neither know the words to say everything they’ve carried since that peacetime summer kiss, though. Even as they stand in the same room, there’s a thousand miles between them.
But maybe that’s some distance the little angel in Roger’s rucksack can cross.
Review: If you’ve ever wondered what yearning reads like, L.A. Witt’s Christmas Angel novella, Christmas Homecoming, is the very definition of longing—for something, for someone, so deeply that the very narrative inspires a distinctly poignant engagement in the story. That’s not even a decent explanation, really. Christmas Homecoming isn’t as much about reading the words on the page as it is allowing yourself to commiserate with the pathos and immerse yourself in the want that exists between its two protagonists, Roger Miller and Jack O’Brien. This story engaged my heart, my sense of compassion and a deeper reaching empathy for what it means to love someone and yet, at the same time, know that person can never be unabashedly adored or be part of a life fully lived. Not when that love is illegal and the expectation is marriage and children.
It’s the innocence of a first kiss on a late summer day that begins the story, but it’s World War II that ushers in the loss of innocence and a long and silent separation that Roger and Jack must confront and then work to overcome when the war ends and they come face to face with each other for the first time in six long years. For the first time since The Kiss. For the first time since a train carried Jack away from their small Iowa farm town. And away from Roger.
The tie-in to the series, of course, is the small wooden Christmas angel, carved in the 18th century by a master artist (in Eli Easton’s Christmas Angel), which has found its way through the generations, passing from owner to owner and bringing people together, urging them through mysterious means to grab hold of the love that’s right in front of them before it can slip away. The sense of fatalism for Roger and Jack is considerable, realistically so, and is confronted in both a longing for forever and an understanding of the situation for men such as them. There are stolen moments of bliss, incredibly tender moments that both underscore the impossibility of them being together and allows the reader to reach, heart-first, along with Roger and Jack for a resolution to their problem. One that Witt delivers beautifully.
Christmas Homecoming isn’t about the glitter and garland of the holidays. It’s about finding home—not the place but the person—and grabbing hold of the one and only who makes an impossible love possible. L.A. Witt did everything right in this story, from beginning to end.
You can buy Christmas Homecoming here:
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