Comfort and Joy

August 22, 2011
Sunday Times columnist and YA writer Knight (The Dirty Bits for Girls) creates a space for musings on love, family, and the simultaneous trials and delights of the holiday season in her perpetually witty novel. Readers follow Londoner Clara Dunphy née Hutt through multiple relationships over the course of three Christmases as she searches for the perfect celebration and looks for answers to her own murky family history. While the setting and tone change from Christmas to Christmas, that unerringly familiar combination of glow and chaos, what remains constant is a cast of lovable characters, from Pat, Clara’s Northern Irish mother-in-law, who insists on speaking in an offensive combination of slang and Spanish on a family trip to Morocco, to Clara’s free-spirited stepsisters. Dotting the landscape are Clara’s questions about the biological father she never knew but can’t stop thinking about. Although there’s little in the way of plot and the extended family can get Rockwellian, Knight makes up for it with well-paced dialogue and amusing and insightful anecdotes. The author captures the spirit of the season while giving us a glimpse into one modern family’s struggle with children, marital turmoil, and materialism.

September 15, 2011

Knight's favorite heroine (My Life on a Plate, 2001) returns, now remarried and juggling a hectic mixed family and a potential new love over the course of three consecutive holiday seasons.  

It's two days before Christmas, and Clara Dunphy takes a break for a champagne cocktail during a last-minute shopping trip. Unexpectedly, she meets a handsome stranger who asks her to stay for a drink. Clara is still married, to a choreographer named Sam, and has a daughter with him and two teenaged sons with her first husband, Robert. But things with Sam have been rocky lately, and Clara can't quite imagine them growing old together. Nonetheless, she returns home to a hectic dinner involving both Sam and Robert, the children, a critical mother, a dottering mother-in-law and several friends in complicated states of single-hood and couple-hood. The brood has a lot to drink and things get awkward, though nothing much actually happens, somewhat emblematic of the novel as a whole. Fast-forward a year. Sam and Clara's marriage has indeed dissolved, and she has rekindled her relationship with the stranger from the previous Christmas, though everyone except said stranger is gathered again for another dinner at her house. Clara finally seems rightly concerned about the effect of all this on her children, which harkens back to issues from her own childhood (though she did have a consistent father figure, her mother is now on her fourth husband, which clearly haunts her). On the third Christmas featured, Clara takes the show on the road, embarking on a family holiday to Morocco. And what of the stranger? Stay tuned. Clara loves Christmas, and it's easy to see why—as long as she can keep all the disjointed people in her life together, they will remain, in the best possible ways, a family.

Plotless, though clearly warm-hearted holiday fun.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from October 1, 2011

Not everything gets wrapped up in a neat little bow in Knight's (My Life on a Plate) refreshingly sharp take on domestic bliss. The reader first meets Clara Dunphy's blended London clan in 2009. A cocktail-fueled discussion of men and women, biological clocks, and the myth of the perfect marriage foreshadows the subsequent two Christmases. Women's fiction with bite.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
Christmas is Clara Dunphy's thing. Every year she gathers her extended, blended familymother, mother-in-law, children, half sisters, friends, ex-husband, ex-stepfathers, and, seriously, morein her London house for festive consumption of presents and food. The novel covers three Christmases (or Christmi, as Clara's sister calls them), and though the cast of characters changes little, their relationships certainly do: fianc's become husbands, husbands become exes, exes become friends. Knight (My Life on a Plate, 2000) does a fantastic job establishing the tone of comfortable, if untraditional, family relationships combined with the frenetic pace of holiday mayhem. The deeper emotional implications of shifting family dynamics are less convincingly portrayed, particularly Clara's feelings about her absent father and her struggling marriage, and a romantic subplot feels extraneous. But the observational humorcovering everything from class differences to bathroom etiquetteis spot-on. The third Christmas, a last-minute holiday in Morocco, is a pure escapist delight. The writing is very British and very funny; readers may feel like they are reading Bridget Jones' newest diary. Not destined to be a classic, but a fun diversion into holiday madness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)