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The holiday season is often flooded with emotions—from joy and excitement to heartbreak and anxiety. And in the holiday romance A Wedding One Christmas by author Therese Beharrie, two strangers who are dreading the holidays end up working through their reservations about the season together.
The story stops in a small South African town with Angie Roux, who’s reluctantly traveling home to visit her family in Cape Town for Christmas. When she ends up caught up in the middle of a holiday wedding, she ducks into a nearby café, where she asks a handsome stranger to be her companion for the day. Ezra Johnson is as smart and as charming as he is handsome—and he seems just as eager to escape the wedding festivities as Angie is. And they soon find themselves building an unexpected connection.
With its distinctive setting and holiday adventures, A Wedding One Christmas might have you dreaming of a quirky holiday wedding of your own. This one takes place in a charming riverfront town in South Africa in the middle of the town’s annual holiday celebrations—which means that the wedding festivities are broken up by holiday parades and improvised Christmas pageants instead of just the usual speeches and dancing.
In the middle of all of the merriment, though, these two characters struggle with their reservations about both weddings and the holidays. And that makes the story relatable for anyone who finds the holiday season less than perfectly joyful. Both are worried about returning home to families who might pass judgment instead of simply enjoying the time together. Ezra is bracing for the “I told you so” from family members who knew that his ex wasn’t right for him. And Angie fears returning home for the first time after running away from her mother and sisters following her father’s death.
The holiday anxieties are definitely understandable; many of us have our own holiday stress. But it causes constant waffling in the budding relationship between the two characters. Each glance, each comment, each memory causes them to change their mind…to take offense…to get defensive. And instead of working through their issues while taking in the fun holiday celebrations, the story spends way too much time in the characters’ thoughts and debates. A little bit of over-thinking can be perfectly reasonable—but page after page after page of fear and self-loathing and insecurity turns what could have been a lovable holiday romance into an exhausting read.
If you enter the holiday season with a little bit of apprehension, you’ll definitely understand the characters in A Wedding One Christmas. But instead of distracting you with a light, breezy holiday romance, the characters’ endless anxieties might just add to your own.
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