Holiday time-travel rom-com lacks festive fun

While The Christmas Cure has all the makings of a festive treat, the holiday-themed novel is underbaked — and so cloying you might feel a bit sick.

The latest offering from bestselling Toronto-area author Karma Brown (Recipe for a Perfect Wife, Come Away With Me and more), writing under the pen name Kristine Winters, her holiday-romance writer persona, is billed as a “cozy holiday rom-com.”

Light on rom, the story leans into cringey com: a candy-cane-obsessed pot-bellied pig knocks a woman unconscious and sends her back in time to relive last Christmas.

Protagonist Elizabeth “Libby” Munro is a Toronto ER doctor who returns to her Hallmark-esque hometown of Harmony Hills while going through a breakup and contemplating a job change. Headed back for a rare visit with her parents and sister, Libby meets Liam — who needs foreshadowing when you have alliteration?

She also runs into his foster pet, the mischievous (and maybe magical?) Mary Piggins.

Libby gets ghost-of-Christmas-future vibes in the present day when she sees how much of her family’s life she’s missed out on while she’s been working, and she needs to be quite literally knocked back into the past to make changes.

If that premise doesn’t immediately get you feeling the Christmas spirit, well, what if you knew Liam’s eyes are “mistletoe green,” and that he smells like mulled apple cider?

Don’t swoon yet; time travel doesn’t happen till Chapter 10.

Libby tells the reader she and Liam have “clear chemistry.” I’m not going to call her an unreliable narrator; I stopped counting after the 13th time she described his dimples.

Sure, they both love peppermint hot chocolate, unlike her ex, who wanted to move to the States and (gasp) didn’t have a sweet tooth.

But if you’re looking for banter, flirtation or real emotion between these love interests, you’re mostly going to have to settle for their off-key caroling and their sense of shared longing — for cinnamon-swirl bread, maple taffy, whipped shortbread — you get the gist. They love carbs. It’s all so sweet.

Don’t get me wrong: I love a holiday meet-cute. When it’s dark and cold out, I want twinkly lights everywhere, including in my reading material.

I thought I had a high tolerance for cheesy Christmas novels. This one tests it.

Let’s focus on the good for a moment: there’s a real attempt at world-building that may appeal to fans of Gilmore Girls. Harmony Hills is full of folksy characters and the town calendar is teeming with charming festivals.

But it all feels one-dimensional.

Every step of the way, our heroine steers the reader past any possibility of nuance, stating the obvious, like, “I’m different in this timeline.”

I’m still a little sour at having to suffer through a character’s (arguably entirely unnecessary) bout of food poisoning, only for much of the plot to feel rushed to a predictable end. Personal preference: I never want mention of vomit in my light reading.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get lost in an everything-works-out wintry story. If that’s what you’re after, Rainbow Rowell’s Landline plays on a Christmas time-swap theme with much more skill, humour and heart.

Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date series (including her Christmas-themed Royal Holiday) crackles with chemistry.

Even beach-read queen Carley Fortune includes a Christmas chapter in This Summer Will Be Different, if you want a Canadian setting.

The Christmas Cure can’t be elevated to so-bad-it’s-good territory because of poor pacing and a repetitive writing style that’s less “show don’t tell” and more “tell, tell again.”

You could have a few spiked eggnogs between chapters and not lose the plot.

Go ahead, nobody will judge.

Katie May is a Free Press staffer who has clearly never tried to write a novel, so take all of this with a grain of salt.