Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
Can a miracle second chance really exist? Just ask Robert, who lost the lov of his life to AIDS on Christmas 24 years ago.

BOOK REVIEW:
Christmas is a celebration of joy, love, and laughter, not of tears and grief, but for Robert, Christmas of 1983 is the worst he’s ever endured. His beloved Keith is dying of a disease almost too “new” to be considered AIDS, and Robert refuses to leave their penthouse apartment. Instead, he orders up a festive Christmas which only he has the health and the courage to view. A miracle of sorts does occur, but it leaves the bittersweet entwining of joy and love with eternal grief.

Twenty-four years later the situation is almost the converse. Where Robert had been a young college-age man beloved of the forties’ something Keith and had lost Keith to death, now Robert is near the age Keith had been at death and has a young lover himself, one who is possibly either cheating, or at least contemplating cheating.

Robert believes his one and only chance died with Keith, so he allows Ethan’s rampant infidelity, barely even disguised. To Ethan, Robert is only an aging “Sugar Daddy,” and he’ll take him for all he’s worth while simultaneously maintaining his own frozen heart.

Walking to the lake shore, Robert discovers a girl crouched on the boulders crying her heart out. He convinces her not to go through with her suicide, but his rescue proves to be more fated than accidental. Lesbian Jess is also grieving her lost lover, but due to the other woman’s moving out rather than to death. Now she begins to dream of Robert ~ a much younger Robert ~ and from an unusual perspective.

Rick Reed draws out the suffering of Robert, a man who knows no hope exists but yet insists on hoping for a miracle, “dressing up” Christmas just for the event the miracle might occur. The reader’s heartstrings will be more than tugged with this one; few readers will finish without shedding tears for both Robert and the dying Keith, enduring a horrible cancer without hope of treatment or remission. Jess also is clearly delineated, although she seems a somewhat less sympathetic character than Robert. The strengths of the novel, for me, lie in the depths of Robert and Keith’s love, and in the unveiling of the new emotions between Robert and Jess, with the suggestions that Jess is not “only” Jess, but carries another soul as well. From the grief of the initial chapters and the pain of the center core of the story comes the hope and joy of the final chapters, an encouragement to readers of all persuasions to hope for a miraculous “second chance.”

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