REVIEWED by Jen B.
TITLE: Christmas Homecoming
SERIES: The Christmas Angel #4
AUTHOR: L.A. Witt
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 79 Pages
RELEASE DATE: December 2, 2018
BLURB:
August 1939. Roger Miller and Jack O’Brien have been close since childhood. By the time they realize there’s more between them than friendship, Jack is leaving their sleepy Iowa town for college. But they console themselves knowing he’ll be home for Christmas. Right?
It is Christmas before they see each other again, but that Christmas comes six years and a world war later. Aged, beaten, and shaken by combat, they’re not the boys they were back then, but their feelings for each other are stronger than ever.
Neither know the words to say everything they’ve carried since that peacetime summer kiss, though. Even as they stand in the same room, there’s a thousand miles between them.
But maybe that’s some distance the little angel in Roger’s rucksack can cross.
The Christmas Angel series books are standalones and can be read in any order.
REVIEW:
This is one of those stories I grabbed without reading the blurb just because I’m a huge fan of the author. I’m not a huge fan of historical stories (or holiday stories, lol), however, but I still wasn’t too worried. Once again, that paid off for me, because this was a wonderful story. It’s hard to imagine what things were like back then, when men were drafted into the military, or when they signed up because it was the only option they saw for themselves. It’s even more difficult to imagine what it was like for gay men.
Here, two guys were best friends up through high school when they shared one kiss before one and then the other went off to war. Neither knew how the other felt after that kiss, though they turn out to be the same in the end. After their communications (which never discuss actual feelings) die off, it seems as though all is forgotten, but it was that kiss that changed things for them and helped each of them get through the horrors of the war. Fast forward to them returning home at the holidays when seeing each other brings that kiss back and the feelings they still have.
I love seeing a new aspect to things that I perhaps hadn’t thought of on my own. In this story, it was the fact that these guys had to grieve their lost ones in private. So, not only were they having relationships in secret, but when one dies, they are not able to let their grief show beyond what would have been considered normal at that time. Maybe that commonality is something else that linked these guys together. I found it hard to picture how these guys could ever be together given the time, but they do find what is probably the best way they could come up with.
I pretty much read this in one sitting, and although I would have liked a bit more detail about how their families were about the situation, I imagine they fell into the same category as everyone else and mostly just ignored the possibility there was anything more than what they were told. All in all, this was a really heartwarming friends to lovers story that made me want to wrap them up in a big warm hug and not let go. Definitely recommend even if you’re not a huge fan of historicals.
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