A Christmas Romance book review by Robin Sneed at Keeping Christmas 365
A Secret Christmas Family is a Christmas Romance novel from Harlequin’s Love Inspired Inspirational Romance line. There is no better way to keep Christmas 365 days a year than to read a Christian Christmas Romance!
“Legally married, but far from wed…”
Jenna Mindel
The book of Ruth has inspired many women. Apparently, Jenna Mindel is one of those women. It’s quite comforting to find empowered women in The Bible. Women like Ruth and Naomi take control and make decisions. It’s especially comforting to Christian women to see that those bold decisions and actions were blessed by God.
A Secret Christmas Family features a modern-day Ruth and Naomi. Recently widowed Ruth Miller is still in shock over the sudden death of her husband. when she discovers that she may lose her home as well as her husband’s business if she doesn’t come up some cash quickly, she snaps into action.
Ruth hates that she has no choice but to take her mother-in-law’s advice. Naomi insists that Ruth call Bo Harris, a distant cousin of Naomi’s … and of Cole’s. When Bo comes to their rescue with a plan to help save the business and her family home, Ruth’s mother-in-law wonders if Bo might be their Boaz, their kinsman redeemer.
Naomi doesn’t know all of the specifics of Ruth’s deal with Bo. She has no idea that in order to get his hands on the money to save her business, Bo has to be married for a year. She doesn’t know that Ruth said yes, and Ruth wants to keep it that way. In fact, she read the contract carefully and insisted that a non-disclosure clause be put in the contract. This way, she protects Naomi and her sons, while saving their home and livelihood.
What’s Bo Hiding?
Like her son Owen, Ruth asks a lot of questions. How else are people supposed to get to know each other? But, Bo keeps his secrets close. She knows that she needs to keep this arrangement strictly business, but she also knows that if they’re going to be business partners, she needs to be able to trust Bo. And right now, she doesn’t trust him. She doesn’t even know him.
She married him out of desperation, to save her sons, her mother-in-law, and herself from destitution. But did she make the right choice?
Discovering that his former boss was also a cousin was hard on Bo, especially considering that Bo thinks the accident that killed Cole was his fault. Meeting his widow, Bo knew that he had to do something to make things right. If Cole were still here, Ruth wouldn’t be facing these decisions on her own. Bo knew that Cole had wanted his boys to inherit his company some day. With his business expertise and knowledge of the inner workings of Miller Logging, Cole could help Ruth turn things around.
Bo has every intention of keeping his distance from his former boss’s widow, especially after he discovers a budding attraction for her. When he meets her sons, his heart suddenly goes out to the boys who are desperately missing their father. They want a father-figure in their life. Could he fill that void? Does he even have a right to want to fill that void?
The guilt Bo carries keeps him up at night, and it keeps him from admitting the truth to Ruth: he’s falling in love with her. He wants their marriage to be real, not just a business deal.
Getting Too Close
Bo can’t blame Ruth for wanting to learn how to run her husband’s business. However, it would be a lot easier if he didn’t have to be the one to show her the ropes. Keeping his distance from Cole’s widow becomes even more difficult when he discovers that the only available apartment in town is the one over Ruth’s garage. That means he’ll see her at work and at home.
But it also means that he’ll get more time with Ruth’s two boys. Ethan seems to hate Bo, but Owen clings to him. He won’t push himself on Ethan, but he will try to be there for him and his brother. Unfortunately, that means that he can’t keep denying his attraction to their mother. It wouldn’t be right to tell her he loves her without first telling her the truth: that he’s responsible for Cole’s death. Will she hate him?
Analysis (Spoilers)
As Christians, many of us struggle with the same things that Ruth, Bo, and Ethan struggle with. Is it disloyal to the one we lost to love someone else? Is it possible to love more than one person at a time? How soon is too soon to start loving someone new? Am I allowing God to lead, or am I forging ahead with my own plan?
Eight-year-old Ethan struggles with liking Bo. “He’s not dad.” He realizes that Bo is doing the things that his dad should be doing. When Ruth tells Ethan that it’s okay to like Bo, that it’s not being disloyal to his father, she starts to accept those words herself.
Bo fears he’s not good enough. He keeps replaying the day of Cole’s accident in his mind over and over again. Did he tighten the rope correctly? He’d done it so many times that it had become habit, and he just couldn’t remember. His gut tells him he’s to blame. However, Bo finally discovers the truth: he did tighten the rope correctly. The foreman had checked it, had checked all the ropes, before Cole began to cut. It was an accident, and one that he could not have prevented.
When Bo accepts that he is not to blame, he realizes that he had internalized the feelings that accompanied witnessing such a tragedy as guilt.
“All these months he’d been uncertain, but his gut had pronounced him guilty. Maybe, because he had envied everything Cole had, he’d internalized the trauma he’d witnessed as guilt. As something he’d done wrong.”
Jenna Mindel
Many of us have experienced that same sense of panic, but hopefully not with the same tragic outcome. Did I lock the door? Did I turn off the oven? The curling iron? Did I leave the water dripping so the pipes wouldn’t burst? It’s easy when we let our habits put us on auto-pilot to not remember. We’ve probably all gotten into our vehicles after a long day, start the car, and then suddenly find ourselves in our driveway with little memory of how we got there.
That’s what makes Bo’s plight so relatable. We’ve all been there. Many of us have even carried guilt with us for things that are not our fault.
I’m not one who cries easily. Therefore, the highest recommendation that I can give in a romance book review is this: A Secret Christmas Family made me cry. When it felt like things might be over between them, my stomach literally ached for them. Yes, some part of me knew that this is a Christmas romance, so of course they’ll come together in the end. However, for just a little while, I was so completely emersed in their story that I wept for their pain, which made the happily ever after so much more satisfying!
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Page last updated: January 1, 2023
