I finished "The Last Noel" three days ago and it's still on my mind. Why? Because I cared about the main characters. Having grown up in the South I have some understanding of the white/black servant mentality. When I was small, my Aunt Gin had a black maid named Easter (guess her birthday - she probably didnt know the exact date). I loved her to death. She cooked, cleaned and smiled. I Gin & I taking Easter home from work one day. She wouldn't sit in the front and my little mind wondered "why"? Her house literally looked one step above a shack. But I was small and "that's the way it was." As an adult, I've wanted to explore the minds of Southerners in that era. They dearly loved the people that worked for them but didn't question how they lived. Easter probably received a pittance from my Aunt Gin, who probably thought she was being very generous. * * * Thankfully, things have changed. Noel and Kaye's story helps us understand that. I get teary-eyed thinking of the ending of the book. Thank you Michael Malone for making these people and their story so real to me.
I suggest your reading Clarence Thomas's story, "Having Our Say" by the Delaney sisters, and "The Color of Water." They, too, will give you a greater understanding of the black/white experience. ( )

This book is about a rich white girl and the poor black boy whose family are her family's servants. The beginning time period is the '60s, so you assume it is going to be a book about race. Not really. It is a very light read with a very unrealistic story. ( )

Let’s start with the cover, the skin of the book. The designers at Sourcebooks have packaged Michael Malone’s novel The Last Noel in such a way that it is…well, nothing less than beautiful at first glance.

Against a white background, a red sled carves two gray tracks across the front of the book. The author’s name (white letters cut out of a band of gray) and the title (red letters matching the color of the sled) float elegantly against the stark white.

The only way to do this cover justice is to see (and touch) it in person. There's no dustjacket; the sled is printed directly onto the board cover. Malone's name and the title are printed on an overlaid strip of vellum, giving the whole thing a fuzzy, frosty look.

You may wonder why I’ve devoted so much review real estate to the outside of the book. After all, we’re told not to judge it, yadda yadda. Michael Malone (Dingley Falls, First Lady) didn’t do the covers, for God’s sake; he wrote what’s between them.

If only whoever was responsible for the skin of the book had had a hand in shaping its internal organs, too!

Frankly, The Last Noel is a disappointment. If this is a Christmas gift to the American reading public, then it’s like that argyle sweater which always forced you to plaster a sickly smile on your face and offer up weak thanks to your aunt who was watching you unwrap the box with giddy love and anticipation. It’s the thought that counts, right?

Not always. Mr. Malone’s heart is in the right place but giddy love does not a good book make.

The Last Noel begins in 1963 when seven-year-old Noelle (“Noni�) Katherine Tilden, privileged white child of Moors, North Carolina, is awakened by John Montgomery (“Kaye�) King, black grandson of her family’s maid.

They were the same age, born within hours of one another, but because she had arrived first, late on Christmas Eve, and his birth was not until the early dawn of Christmas Day, she would sometimes fight against his dominance with claims of her own seniority. It was a battle waged for years and never won.

That first Christmas Eve, Kaye convinces Noni to sneak out of the house and go sledding with him in the freshly-fallen snow. It’s the start of a friendship which will teeter on romance for the next forty years. Each of the twelve chapters offers a Christmas snapshot of the two as they struggle with adolescence, racism, war, careers in music and medicine, marriage, death and all those other big issues we face across the decades.

With passages like this—

Softly his hand slid over hers. She looked into his eyes. Again his eyes stopped laughing but this time he didn’t look away. She looked at him, kept looking and deep at her heart’s core she felt something lock into place. She felt that the Noni she was seeing reflected in his eyes was the truest part of herself.

—it’s evident Malone’s ambition is to pen an old-fashioned holiday romance, a volume to be pulled out each December 20th and read again with sighs and misty eyes. Unfortunately, at least for this Grinch of a reader, nothing in my heart ever locked into place.

I’ll admit, it’s an engaging idea—telling the life-story of a romance through what is perhaps our most romantic/nostalgic holiday. I mean, who doesn’t get drippy as melting snow around Christmastime? But Malone’s gimmick works against him. Meeting Noni and Kaye once every few years across a span of twelve Yuletides never allows us to grow close to them. Character development is shortchanged in favor of the structure of the book (already pretty thin at 292 pages).

A large portion of each chapter is, by necessity, devoted to great chunks of exposition—sweeping paragraphs which update us on what’s transpired in the intervening years between chapters. Just when we start to get a little cozy with Kaye and Noni, that chapter ends and the calendar flips forward another five years. It’s like dipping in and out of a river, never getting fully immersed in the characters' lives when what we really want is to swim with the current.

Malone sweeps us through the forty-year calendar by sprinkling pop culture references throughout the chunky, clunky exposition.

Kaye and Noni slow-danced while around them there was talk of Three Mile Island, new Swedish stoves, Apocalypse Now, pocket calculators, the Sugar Bowl, the Pritikin diet, the new discount mall, whether sexual fidelity was unnatural to the human species, and what the meaning of happiness might conceivably be.

(I probably don’t need to tell you that’s from the 1979 chapter)

It’s cute at first, but soon turns contrived and annoying.

Speaking of annoyance, let’s go back to that vellum-wrapped cover for a moment. After only a few hours of reading The Last Noel, the heat and grime from my fingers started to curl the vellum strip and the whole thing quickly lost its appeal.

So, the clever little cover turned out to be nothing but beautiful paper which, when torn away, left me holding an argyle sweater. ( )

While reading this book, I kept thinking: this is a plot worthy of a movie of the week. But it was so well done, so beautifully written, that I loved it anyway. Grab a box of tissues and a blanket and cuddle up with this book for a while. A good cry can be therapeutic. ( )