The Twelve Suitors of Christmas by Maren Baum

I received an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) of this Christmas novella after seeing the author’s page on Instagram. Being a massive Christmas fan and a collector of Christmas books, this immediately piqued my interest, so I requested a copy which duly arrived as a PDF. Now, usually I will not read a novel on a screen, but the plot and the setting persuaded me to put my usual objections to one side and give it a go.

The Plot

My Thoughts

The first scene in the book is of Clara, her four brothers and Tom Pembroke putting up Christmas decorations on Christmas Eve, and it is an extremely original and highly effective way of introducing the characters that we are going to spend the next 100 pages or so with. Clara is up on the ladder with a kissing bough, determined to show that she can keep up with her brothers. Her brothers are gathered around the tree watching the proceedings with amusement as siblings do. Tony, the youngest sibling, is holding the ladder but can’t resist moving it an inch to frighten his sister. Edmund, the oldest, is told that he will be blamed because that’s the most restful option for all concerned! Ben and James are the middle two of the brothers and work as a pair. Tom is a friend of James’ who has been part of the extended family for nearly a decade, ever since Clara was fourteen years old. By the end of the first chapter you instantly know the characters of the family through their actions and their conversations. It is an extremely skilful piece of writing.

Clara has been pursued by prospective suitors since her late teens but by Christmas 1812 she has not proved amenable to any of them because of her habit of making instant, albeit usually accurate, judgements. Tom tells her that she will have ‘pinned’ a man by the end of their first sentence as a naturalist will pin an insect. He suggests a wager, that, starting on Christmas Day, she will allow twelve men to call on her by Twelfth Night and give all of them a fair chance to impress. If none of them prove to be acceptable then she will have proven her judgement to be impeccable. Tom is sure she won’t be able to do it, but you can see the determined jut of Clara’s chin as she is adamant that she can. The suitors prove surprising to Clara, as she is required to actually listen to them and talk to them on a level beyond expected politeness. There are two or three of them who seem to be very good prospects, but is she going to overlook the suitor who is the most suited to her?

I went to Bath once over 30 years ago and I’ve never read any of the novels written or set in the Regency period. Despite this, Maren Baum’s writing instantly engaged me with its sense of time and place. There’s a brilliant line early on where her first potential suitor tells her that she has grown. ‘Clara, who was three-and-twenty and had not grown in any
direction since Trafalgar, said she supposed she had.’ I thought that was a really clever turn of phrase, and it told me that she was a fresh faced young woman who could have passed for sixteen. Each suitor has different characters which come through conversations that are funny but not performative, meaning that however long you meet them for they spring from the page. Outside of the wager, the details of a Regency Christmas are fascinating as it is one time period I know very little about. I was aware that Christmas Trees had not yet been popularised, but I knew nothing about Kissing Boughs. The meals are described but not in exhaustive detail, with a goose and a piece of sirloin being the centrepiece of Christmas Dinner, thirty one years before Charles Dickens began the process of popularising the turkey. The Twelfth Cake fascinated me so I looked it up and the traditional recipe almost made my eyes pop out! It is a seriously big cake in its original form, with two pounds of butter, two pounds of sugar, five pounds of fruit and twenty eggs! The details throughout were fascinating and engaging but they never took the attention away from the story.

In some ways, Clara is a young lady who would be completely comfortable in a modern romantic comedy. She is something of a tomboy at heart. Her appearance in the first scene at the top of the ladder with her brothers watching shows independence and determination. However, she is aware that Georgian society and her parents have certain expectations that she is duty bound to meet, so she is in no way anachronistic. What she is, is delightful company from first page to last in a book with festive delights on each page. I just hope that those pages are between the covers of a physical book next year. If they are it will definitely go on to my list of yearly re-reads.