Local Christian Book Review: A Second Chance for Sugarplums

Title: A Second Chance for Sugarplums 

Author: Emily Dana Botrous

Date: 2019

Quote: "She was coming home to get away from one man, not to get mixed up with another."

But when one is young and cute it takes considerable determination to keep young men from getting themselves mixed up with one's life. No sooner does Alexandria decide to leave the jerk who's lived with her long enough to be sure and is still refusing to have the wedding already, than her high school sweetheart, the only other man she's ever loved, plops into the seat next to hers on the plane back to the Tri-Cities Regional Airport...

Tri-Cities? Can it be? YES! It can be; it is! This small town romance is about a fictional town like the ones in my corner of Virginia. Probably most like Clintwood, because it's called Claywood. 

And oh, how it rings true...even and especially the perception that common-law marriage, the commitment that (in my opinion) makes a wedding into a real marriage, is a big bad sin. Allie let herself be guilt-tripped into living with her boyfriend in the big city and probably alienated him by feeling guilty about doing that. 

I just know that some reader is going to say "Yes, but she suffers and repents! If you'd only repented, perhaps God would have blessed you!" If a critical number of local lurkers really want to read my personal testimony on that subject, that can be arranged. I wrote the first draft of this review with my personal testimony in it, then decided most readers just wanted to know about the book. 

Back to the book, then. Yes, its delightful local atmosphere features a realistically stubborn, disagreeable old relative. Alexandria's own relatives love her and are glad to have her back, but paying jobs are scarce, and the one Alexandria finds sets her up as a personal assistant to the very same prospective mother-in-law whose hostility drove her off to Miami in the first place. Because this is a romance, the mother-in-law is much less disagreeable than her type normally are in real life, but I'll let that pass. The image of a yuppie bank employee "temporarily" helping a geriatric patient get on and off the toilet is so, so true to local life. 

Because they're only 24 and 25 years old, Alexandria and her high school boyfriend are still single and, if anything, more attractive to each other than ever. They're still very active in the local church, where her father preaches. Her future mother-in-law is a renowned cook; Alexandria is a mediocre one, but that comes to please the older lady. But the boyfriend's aunt who used to make oldfashioned sugarplums at Christmas is gone. Nobody else cared for sugarplums, or learned how to make them. Can Alexandria and his aunt's daughter follow the old recipe and make sugarplums like the aunt's?

I thoroughly enjoyed this romance. The author states clearly that the characters are fiction, and they are. Not only are their identities fictional; their good fortune, and the niceness that makes them deserve it, are peculiar to characters in romance fiction. At the same time their moral sense, their determined character, even the expressions they only occasionally use, are so utterly typical of the Blue Ridge Mountains that, for me at least, the atmosphere in this book more than makes up for its being merely a romance. For a genre that's expected to consist of predictable, even cliche, fiction this book contains a remarkably high proportion of freshly observed, timely, insightful truth.