Review of Christmas at Grandfather's House: a heart-warming novel in stories (Hardcover)

I've never spent much time in small towns, but novelist Mark Leever made me feel as though I had.Specifically Wharton, where reading this book makes it hard to believe it is a work of fiction since I now feel a part of all the families there and their Christmases past and present.

In the first story, Fine Thread, you are visiting your grandfather's house and you remember exactly what it was like to be 10 years old there at Christmas....30 years earlier.

Mary Ellen, despite her successful escape, takes us back to Wharton to face the ghosts of her past in The Wharton Echo.

In Snowflake, 12 year old Thomas Mullen and his grandfather lead us through a Christmas Eve in 1985 that turns magical and although we know "nothing lasts forever," we find that Christmas is a time for wishing and remembering and perhaps that is what lasts forever.

Seasons' Greeting is a great title for this wonderful story as indeed the seasons are plural!

Then there's my favourite character - lovable, comical Carlton, in Ninety Degrees who spends a riotous Christmas Eve at the hospital.

All the stories come together in a nice, neatly wrapped package in Christmas Day and throughout them all we see Dr. Glover.
Dr. Glover is just one of the reasons I love this book. In 1985 Dr. Glover had been the town's medical practitioner for 53 years.He is the connecting thread throughout all of the stories.He seemed to be at the grassroots of the small town and grew with it over the years, along with his expanding girth!But the good doctor is not without fault.

Christmas at Grandfather's House has a powerful, pleasing, all encompassing quality, brilliant in its ambiguity and now is sine qua non on my bookshelf!It brims with interesting characters, and they all make me feel that they are as real as the people in my own family.

As in the author's own words regarding snowflakes..."each precious gem carrying with it a simple but true promise of Christmas"....and so each of the tightly connected stories that make up Christmas at Grandfather's House are gems unto themselves with each story having its own unique theme: love, salvation, hope, forgiveness - to name a few - and the overall motif of the book culminates with a humanness all its own.

To see what happens to Dr. Glover, Tommie, Carlton, Mary Ellen and the rest of the people who love, live and breath in Christmas at Grandfather's House, you'll need to read the book!




Product Description
If you have ever spent Christmas at your grandfather's house, Mark Leever will remind you of those unforgettable times and have you yearning for them again in this beguiling and profoundly moving book. Comprising six stories carefully connected by time (Christmas, 1985), place (the town of Wharton), theme, and character, Christmas at Grandfather's House is a holiday collection unlike any other: it unfolds like a novel. By turns comical, charming, and poignant, each story is a treasure of the heart, combining the childhood miracle that is Grandfather's house, with the miracle of Christmas that makes every one, and everyone who shares it, unique. A man who realizes the enduring value of family in his remembrance of a long-past Christmas Eve . . . A boy and his grandfather who try desperately to save an old woman's life with the most improbable medicine of all . . . A granddaughter who learns that love is expressed in many different ways . . . A woman who will do anything to help a husband being robbed of reality by age, and a man who will do whatever he must to remain in his wife's reality . . . A teenage boy who brightens an Emergency Room . . . And through it all, a town doctor who has devoted his life to the family and friends he loves, while harbouring a dark secret . . . a secret that at last comes to light on a snowy Christmas Day. Written from diverse points of view, Christmas at Grandfather's House weaves readers into that very special fabric of small town life, revealed through the eyes of grandsons and granddaughters, grandfathers and grandmothers, as they give and receive gifts far more precious than anything money can buy. Readers will never think of Christmas the same way again.

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