Sappy Christmas to All, and to All a "Good Night, This is Bad!"
Amazon says:
Barnes & Noble thinks
Author: Greg Kincaid Title: AChristmas Home Genre: fiction
Every year, somebody publishes a novel (usually small, inevitably saccharine) that’s intended to warm the cockles of the hearts of people who only read one or two books a year. One year, it was a book from Gregory D. Kincaid, Esq.: A Christmas Home. That book is the third in a loose aggregation of books about the McCrays, a rural Kansas farm family; their developmentally-disabled son, Todd; and Christmas, the black Lab whose adoption warmed the cockles of the one-book-a-year crowd back in 2008 (and again as a Hallmark movie in 2009, though Christmas apparently bleached his hair for that flick).
It's a black lab!
As one might expect from this year’s would-be cockle-warmer, there is storm and strife to be had in tiny Crossing Trails, Kansas. The city and county have both dropped the ball, giving the town’s no-kill shelter the word that they have just a month to place all the shelter’s inmates before bulldozers flatten the building to make room for a convenience store. Naturally, the employees – one of whom is Todd McCray – and the volunteers – one of whom is the disabled Laurie, who’s smitten with Todd – are bereft. This gang will not be denied; however, vowing that the remaining forty-plus animals will be placed with loving families before the shelter closes. It’s not going to be easy, especially since the book has more than a touch of the “pile disaster on disaster” gene.
On the personal front, twenty-four year-old Todd is flowering: he’s living by himself (albeit within a stone's throw of his parents), owns his own pick-'em-up truck, and has a job – except that job will end when the shelter closes. With the help of his father he gets a lead on another job working with animals, but working with cows at the local dairy just isn’t the same for Todd as training dogs like he trained Gracie to be Laurie’s companion animal. Times are tough, however… Todd has another quandary besides the job question: he’s not certain what these funny feelings about Laurie mean and what to do about them. There are some things that parents just can’t do for their children.
It’s a Christmas story, though, so we know that everything will turn out in the end – maybe even better than we expect!
Kansas resident Greg Kincaid’s third “Christmas” novel covers a narrow range of familiar themes. Love your animals and adopt shelter dogs; and golden-rule the “differently-abled” like Todd because their different worldviews and abilities should be viewed as an asset, not a liability. On those themes, Kincaid is positive – and, a little more often than this reader prefers, positively preachy. I suppose that’s the point, however (that and making lots of cash with this year’s Christmas book).
That’s not the chief problem with A Christmas Home, though. It’s not that the book is as predictable as a baseball game between the Florida Marlins and your kid’s Little League team, either. If anything, it’s that the writing is so stilted and clumsy that it reads like the small print on an end-user license agreement. The characters are paper-thin (except that lovable Lab) and it’s chock full of head-scratchers like “How can people whose house has been foreclosed afford a moving company, but can’t afford to feed their dog?”
Wanna read it? Your call: it isn’t objectionable, it just isn’t very good. As for me, I’m glad I got it from the library and didn’t fork over sixteen bucks (twenty for the CD) for it.