Maybe that’s because they started their relationship at such a young age. Marnie Afton and Tom Jakes met in their teens, back when Tom was the black sheep of Ryder’s Crossing, Tennessee. Abandoned by his mother and kicked out of the house by his alcoholic father, Tom moved in with Marnie and her grandmother at the age of sixteen. They dated through college and married after graduation, but divorced four years later. Adding up all that time, Marnie and Tom have known each other too long to be as incapable of communicating as they are.

You see, in all those years prior to their marriage, it apparently never occurred to them to discuss the issue of children. Four years after their wedding, Marnie finally decides to bring up the subject, only to be shocked by Tom’s honest admission that he doesn’t want kids -- ever. His reasons are numerous -- he was raised in a loveless home, he doesn’t think he’d be a good father, and besides, as a world-traveling employee of the Foreign Service, he values his freedom and flexibility too much to burden himself with children and their need for stability and community ties. Stricken, Marnie leaves him without bothering to have a nice long heart-to-heart.

As a result, they’re left with a misunderstanding of sorts. Tom feels that Marnie left because she didn’t love him enough -- she didn’t want just him, she wanted a father for her children. Marnie actually left because she felt Tom didn’t love her enough -- he didn’t want a real wife or family, just a companion to participate in the parts of his life he was comfortable sharing.

It’s been four years since the divorce and they haven’t talked about their feelings. But neither can forget the other, and neither can form a lasting relationship with anyone else. Now they’re being brought together again by the coming Christmas holiday. Marnie’s grandmother has summoned everyone home for the holidays -- including Tom and the new addition to his family. That’s right -- Tom now has a son, but despite the book’s title and the two-year-old boy featured prominently on the cover, little Cody doesn’t affect the story much.

The fact that he is now a father hasn’t changed Tom’s opinion -- he loves Cody and will raise him as best he can, but he doesn’t want any more children and he still has no wish to be tied down to a community. Marnie, however, has formed some strong community ties back home in Ryder’s Crossing, and if only she could find another man like Tom -- but one who wanted children -- she’d be happy as a clam.

It’s obvious they’re both still in love, and their chemistry is as strong as ever, but they still face the same dilemma. And they still don’t know how to talk about it.

As I read back on this review, it seems that I’ve spent the bulk of it giving background information and restating the same basic points. Well, now that you’ve read all that, you know what reading the first three-fourths of Mistletoe Daddy is like. By page 200, Marnie and Tom have bantered and kissed and danced around each other and romanced each other and sighed and moped and looked wistfully into the distance, but absolutely nothing has been resolved. At that point in the novel they are not one tiny bit closer to solving their problems than they were on page one, and I was so frustrated I wanted to slap both of them, or slap the book to the ground and forget I’d ever started reading it.

They just can’t talk to each other. First they’re too proud and stiff, and then things keep interrupting them, and then they try to talk but can’t find the right words. Nothing happens but pages and pages of cute Cody scenes and irrepressible Grandma antics and minor family crises that have nothing to do with the relationship the book is supposedly about. Finally, things get moving in the last fourth of the book, but by then I was so tired of these two that I didn’t care if they lived happily ever after or not.

Mistletoe Daddy is not badly written, and it doesn’t have one-dimensional characters or gaps of logic in the plot or a thousand other crimes against fiction I’ve come across in the past It’s just way too long. It might have worked nicely as a novella, but 200 pages of backstory and filler I can do without.

--Ellen Hestand