Last year I read Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last and enjoyed it enough to have her on my radar for a book to add to this year’s list. With a happy coincidence of needing a non-Christmas holiday romance for the Read Harder challenge, Three Holidays and a Wedding by Jalaluddin and Marissa Stapley. The story is set in December 2000 when Ramadan, Hannukah, and Christmas all overlapped and tells the story of several people who are snowbound in a small Canadian town when their plane is diverted on its approach to Toronto.
Our main characters are Maryam and Anna. Maryam is travelling with her family en route to her sister’s wedding – which Maryam has struggled to pull together in six weeks during the holiday season. Anna is flying to meet her boyfriend of six months for Christmas with his family, which has been planned down to the minute. Unable to make it to Toronto and traped in a town which doubles as a snowy filming location for holiday movies, both find themselves forging a friendship and dealing with all the various emotional baggage that they brought with them to this small town.
Jalaluddin and coauthor Stapley obviously each took one lead and wrote her story in alternating chapters, using the growth in each other’s chapters to help fuel their own. It works to varying degrees. For the first third of the book, I was convinced I was giving this 2-stars as the overall writing was very clunky. The emotional beats in the Maryam chapters and the sweetness in the Anna chapters eventually won me over, and I rounded up to 3. I was pleased that the Jewish and Muslim traditions were forefronted, and the reality of how much Christmas can overtake and also be incorporated into other traditions was spotlighted, but the instalove tendencies in both storylines were a bit much for me. I think my next Jalaladdin book might be one of her mysteries.
