Season of Love would not have made its way to my holiday season reading if not for emmalita’s lovely gifting of it to me, but it does check several boxes for my recent reading input: it is a queer romance which unpacks big emotions, specifically grief and trauma responses. Season of Love is also a very Jewish story told around several holidays, including Christmas. It also made Buzzfeed’s list of most anticipated LGBTQ romances of 2022 and the books I’ve read from that list (Love & Other Disasters, A Lady for a Duke, The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes) all have been immensely successful for me, 4.5 and up. This book immediately shot to the ‘read right now’ section of my TBR.
In it we have Miriam Blum, an artist who specializes in upcycling antiques with her own unique, glittery lens. She thinks she has her life as she wants it – opening her dream store, beautiful fiancée whom she is in a deal with that includes the fact that they will not fall in love, limiting contact with her family to a once-a-month phone call with her mother, her best friend Cole who is always right where she needs him – until she receives the devastating news that her great-aunt Cass Carrigan has passed away. Doing right by the person in her family she viewed as her north star but hadn’t seen in ten years, forces Miriam to return to Cass’s home and reunite with the family she felt she had to walk away from all those years before.
But great-aunt Cass is the sort to meddle from the grave and has made a change to her will, Miriam is now part-owner of Carrigan’s, her Jewish-run Christmas tree farm and inn with her cousin Hannah, Noelle the tree manager, and the absent Levi. When the truth of the new ownership comes in, along with the fact that the farm and inn are about to go under, Miriam must reckon with every choice she’s made in the past decade and decide what kind of life she really wants. However, she is not the only surrogate kid in Cass’s life. This set of events has thrown into turmoil Noelle Northwood spent a lot of years without roots, or a home. Carrigan’s gave her that, a best friend in Hannah who is simply her person, and the family she had lost many years ago in the form of Cass and the Matthews who live and work at the farm and inn. Miriam’s arrival, and the very lusty thoughts she has about her, threaten to ruin the equilibrium she has built her life on.
There is so much more that could be said about this plot because Helena Greer gives us rich, multi-faceted characters who are going through it in major ways. Each character we meet is fully fleshed out and has their own inner life, whether they have chosen to be completely honest with the people around them or not (often, not). From how the book is structured and how it ends I’m sure the next book by Greer will tell the story of Hannah and Levi, but there is not a single character in the greater world of Carrigan’s and Advent that Greer hasn’t laid groundwork for, and I hope we get treated to an entire series of stories in this universe (I want a Cole book so badly I am practically salivating about it).
I would read all of them, because while Greer gives us the holiday trope-filled Romance that I’m looking for she does it with great depth. The characters speak to each other in conversations that sound so very similar to conversations my fellow elder millennials and I have (Miriam is 35, Noelle is about the same – I can’t remember if we are told her age). Characters have nicknames for each other that are well-deployed but not confusing, they fight and hurt each other and talk it through, sometimes against their will. People’s traumas and previous abuse have lasting impacts that are felt and seen and experienced. The Jewishness is frontloaded, and the Christmassy stuff takes a supporting role. Watching as Miriam thawed out from the icy prison, she had put herself in for safety was rewarding enough to keep me up past my bedtime, but it was all the other glorious details that had me reading into the dark hours of the night.