Married For Christmas

Married for Christmas
by Noelle Adams
Rating 4.5 of 5 stars

My Review:
This was a stay up late kind of book. In fact, since I was too exhausted to stay up, I ended up not sleeping for ages because these characters were in my mind so much. Then the next day, I totally ignored everything else to keep reading. Daniel and Jessica weren't just characters in a book, they were real people living next to me.

Daniel wants to be the pastor at his hometown church, but the elders are hesitant since he's not married. Jessica, as his good friend, really wants a family but has no dating prospects and offers to marry Daniel to solve both of their problems. Daniel has never thought about dating again after his wife died, but decides that he wants the pastorship enough to marry Jessica. There's a lot of unacknowledged attraction in this book and it's even more exquisite because we only get Jessica's perspective.

Noelle Adams did such a great job showing real people, who happen to find their spirituality important, without being an inspirational romance. Meaning there was not a Jesus-makes-everything-better moral, but these people lived their lives in a spiritual way. I could really connect with these characters and knew where they were coming from. And I was glad, even when someone had some here's-how-to-fix-everything lecture, there was still real work involved in growing.

Jessica is ready to settle down, start a family, and feel connected to others. But she has no dating prospects and lives in a very isolated way. She was very real and understandable. She's tried the normal ways to meet people but just doesn't feel like she's making connections. One of the eternal struggles of the introvert: you want to connect but life and spirituality is often tailored to the extrovert personality. She's not really comfortable putting herself out there and is used to being invisible.

She makes such a heartbreaking effort to be a “good pastor's wife”. I felt so connected to her struggle to meet the expectations she thinks everyone has of her. Seeing things only from her perspective, we never really know if anyone's actually expecting something specific from her, but we know Daniel only wants her to be herself and be happy. It was so wonderful to see and feel Jessica truly understand that Daniel accepts her exactly as she is.

We get this story third person, but we're only ever inside Jessica's mind.We see exactly what she's feeling and all of Daniel's feeling processed through Jessica's perception. So much of the story was heartbreaking, to see each of them dealing with their own grief, isolation and pain.

If anything, it felt like Daniel healed a lot through this book but I felt like Jessica was in a happy-for-now place. I would have liked to see Jessica take some positive actions. It felt like at the end of the book she decided to take certain actions but we don't get to see how they work out for her. I wanted to see her feel like she belonged, not just that she was connected to Daniel. But maybe that was enough for her for now. Maybe she really only needed that one extra connection and others might come slowly later.

Daniel is stubborn and for a pastor he just can't truly leave his way-things-should-be mind long enough to keep a connection with people. He doesn't have to let himself out there because he's the one that's supposed to be taking care of everyone. But Jessica challenges that and she forces him to face his heart and not just his mind. It is exquisite to see the connections form so slowly, all the work that both characters put into growing, and all the silent ways they say what they can't find the words for.

After reading this book, I will now have to go read Noelle Adams' entire backlist because I totally love her voice and how compelling her stories are. I can't read them every day because I'd never get anything else done, but this is a need for me. Even now, my head is telling me to find another one of her books to start reading now.