Susan Breen invites readers to kick off the holiday season early with Merry (Sept. 23, Alcove Press), a heartwarming, witty, and delightful novel about family, motherhood, legacy, and ghosts (literally and figuratively). Perfect for fans of Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, Mr. Dickens and His Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, this title is perfect for fall reading lists and holiday gift guides!
SUMMARY: Merry Bingham used to love Christmas—until she started worrying all the time about family, money, and death. The only thing that continues to bring her joy is reading from her heirloom edition of A Christmas Carol, autographed by Charles Dickens himself and passed down through five generations of her family. Now, as she waits for the results of the medical tests that will tell her whether this Christmas season will be her last, Merry prepares to give her book to the next generation. Except none of her three children wants it.
Merry refuses to surrender Christmas or Dickens without a fight, so she sells the book and uses the money to take her family to London. She will fill them with Christmas joy even if she has to cram it down their throats.
But the harder Merry pushes, the worse everything gets. Her children erupt into vicious arguments, her gentle husband stops talking to her, her deluxe rental apartment is not what was promised. Oh, and she keeps seeing the ghost of Charles Dickens around town—and he is not happy with her.
“All the joy and magic of a Hallmark holiday tale with the added depth and urgency of a modern family novel. . .This fresh and clever reimagining of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol drew me in with its astute and empathetic exploration of the complex family dynamics at play between adult children and their imperfect parents.” —Kim van Alkemade, New York Times bestselling author of Orphan #8 and Counting Lost Stars
“From the opening page, the reader is in for a true Christmas treat. Merry is everything a Christmas novel should be—heartwarming and filled with endearing characters. There are many lessons to be learned but Susan approaches them with humor and great holiday cheer. I loved every minute of this wonderful book!” —Anita Hughes, author of Christmas at the Lake and A Magical New York Christmas
Susan Breen is the award-winning author of The Fiction Class and the Maggie Dove mystery series. She teaches novel writing at Gotham Writers and has been on the faculty of conferences from Cape Cod to Dubai. She loves stories about families, London, ghosts, guilt, atonement, dogs, Charles Dickens, and Christmas. She likes the idea of collecting rare books, though so far, she’s only collected two, both of them being early editions of A Christmas Carol.
Home for Christmas? by Susan Breen
Thirty years ago, my husband and I built the house of our dreams. A grand, brick colonial in a lovely Hudson River town. There was a big dining room with built-in bookshelves. The kitchen had huge windows that overlooked the forest behind us. There were black and white tiles in the entry way.
Best of all, it was the perfect Christmas house. A big staircase roped with garlands. Candles in the windows. On the big fireplace I hung stockings for my children, and then their spouses, and then their children. My grandchildren. And also stockings for our dogs. My favorite part of the year was Christmas, when we would all gather together and everyone I loved would be under one roof.
But over time it became clear to us that it was ridiculous to hold on to the house for what amounted to three days a year. I called a real estate agent to ask some questions and next thing you know, an open house was scheduled for March. We launched ourselves into getting ready. Packing boxes. Sorting through memories. Going up and down the attic stairs.
And then I had a heart attack.
I had no idea that that’s what was happening. I was having trouble breathing and I had a terrible burning sensation in my throat that I thought was COVID. But it got so bad that my husband raced me to the emergency room. I wound up needing three stents.
I couldn’t believe it. That wasn’t even on the radar of what I was worrying about.
It turned out, after a lot of testing, that the heart attack was caused by damage to my heart caused by damage to my lungs from radiation almost thirty years earlier. An important note for women here: The symptoms of heart attack in women are very different than those for men. I never had chest pains or a pain in my arm. We tend to get pains in our throat. So we’re often misdiagnosed.
Amazingly, after all that, we still managed to get our house on the market, and we sold it to a lovely young family. I felt truly happy to think of passing along our dreams to another family.
But on the night before the sale went through, I felt so mournful. The house was completely empty and certainly cleaner than it had ever been. As I stood there, at the kitchen counter, I could actually hear sounds from the past echoing around me. Particularly Christmas. I heard my children screaming with laughter as they raced around the hallway in their new blue cars. I could smell the funnel cake my son cooked one year in our kitchen.
I tried to picture Christmas in the future but couldn’t. I was happy about our new apartment, but knew it wouldn’t be big enough to hold us all. Where would we have Christmas? Where would the family gather? Had we just surrendered the place that held our family together? Had we surrendered our relevance? Who were we without our house? Who was I?
Oddly enough, the answer came to me a few weeks later, in cardio therapy, where I’d been going to strengthen my heart. Before you get on the exercise machines, you have to tie on a little smock that holds the medical monitor. Usually I can do it myself, but my hands were weak that day, and I was struggling. A fellow patient asked if she could help. My first impulse was to say no thanks, I’m fine. I really don’t like being in a position of needing help, which seems to me like surrendering. But then I thought, this is ridiculous. I do need help. So I said yes and she tied my bow and then she looked at me and said, “We have to help each other.”
I was touched. We began to talk, two people who had been strangers. We shared our experiences and I felt comfort in talking to her. I felt like I was relinquishing some of the trauma that had been sitting with me since that trip to the emergency room. Surrender can mean many things, I realized. It doesn’t just mean defeat. It can also mean letting go. Acceptance, trust, grace. Love.
I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll be doing this Christmas, but my daughter just moved to a house that has two beautiful fireplaces and I imagine the stockings will look great there. Meanwhile I’m trying to figure out a way to hang a flying Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from my apartment’s balcony. Some types of surrender are impossible.
