It's a Fabulous Life
Kelly Farmer, 2023
This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. Here's an obvious one.
Premise: It's a Wonderful Life, but cheap-Netflix-remake ready.
I've often been a bit of a cynic when it comes to It's a Wonderful Life, and this book didn't cure me of that.
To me it reads like a romance novel full of very standard modern-romance-movie tropes - Girl lives in small town, but wants to move to the city. Girl's high school crush moves back to town and they reconnect. Both get roped into helping with a town holiday festival. Minor drama as girl can't decide whether to stay in town with first love or strike out for dream life in city. Magic of Christmas makes girl appreciate her life in town and decide to stay with first love. The fact that both girl and first love are female just makes it a modern romance, not an untraditional one.
And actually, that part of it is fine. Sweet, even. The leads are cute together, they seem to balance each other well. But the magical shenanigans around the corners of that plot that turn it explicitly into a retelling of the movie just don't feel necessary to me. Even the whole alternate town-if-you-didn't-live-here sequence feels weird. The terrible fate that would befall her town includes gentrification, boring townie bars, and economic depression. Not great, but pretty weird that our heroine is solely responsible for keeping her town a vibrant, diverse, artsy tourist destination.
(Side note to point out that in modern christmas romances, small towns all need to be vibrant, diverse, artsy tourist destinations, otherwise our smart, diverse, successful leads would probably move to the dang city, no matter how much magic there is.)
The book does too much work foreshadowing how important Bailey (yes that's her name, I know) is and how much her friends love her, so her dismissal of her life feels somewhat childish. The only understandable part is her exhaustion, that she feels pressure to do so much, and that isn't going away after the events of the book. I have trouble imagining that resentment not returning.
Anyway, I've been dancing around it, but there are also angels in this book, sort of. There are drag queens with magic powers. And this part is... odd. It feels like part of the movie-pitch nature of the book. With the right casting, costume, and direction, these characters could be a lot of fun. But there's nothing there on the page other than a bundle of over-the-top corny dialogue and flouncing around. I can't decide whether I think they're harmless comic relief or cringeworthy stereotypes.
Overall I didn't hate this book, but I didn't love it either. It was passable at times and cute at times. I'd watch the Netflix movie, though.
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