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A Season to Remember by Sheila O'Flanagan (view source)
Revision as of 19:47, 29 August 2020
, 19:47, 29 August 2020no edit summary
|reviewer=Louise Laurie
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Christmas time and a clutch of characters book themselves in to into the rather swish and beautifully-named Sugar Loaf Lodge. We then meet the characters in more detail and discover their various and varied reasons for choosing not to be 'at home' for Christmas Day.
|rating=4
|buy=Maybe
}}
We first meet the Lodge owners, a likable likeable couple. They find running their upmarket country house type hotel both exhilarating and exhausting. The novel is bang up to date so O'Flanagan gets in the whole recession/banker-bashing thing early on. As the festive season looms, the unthinkable has happened. Empty rooms. They're not used to empty rooms, at any time of the year. Normally the Lodge is a full house. But then a slow and steady trickle starts as our characters book in - and the story starts proper, so to speak.
Each chapter is devoted to a character, or a particular couple or family and O'Flanagan gives various Irish landmarks a bit of a make-over in the shape of room names. Each is given a different name, from the nicely unpronounceable ''Kilmashogue'' and ''Slieveman'' to the more reader-friendly ''War Hill.'' One of the stories concerns a young woman madly in love - with a married man. And yes, I know we've heard it all so many times before. He stays at home and gets to play 'dad' while she's all dolled up to the nines waiting impatiently in some secret meeting place. In this scenario it's the Lodge. All the usual emotions are played out here within a festive context. The female character says with a lump in her throat '' ... I wished that Santa Claus was real, and that he could bring you the person you loved for Christmas.''