Ivy Green left her small upstate New York town and her high school boyfriend Nick Shepherd to go to film school in Los Angeles. She dreamed of being a screenwriter, and she wasn’t going to let anything stand in her way. Her last year of school, Nick came out to L.A. to visit her for Christmas. And while she was sharing with him the joys of a California Christmas, he was thinking about his future. Ivy was talking about finding a place to live in L.A. and trying to find her way into the film business. He wanted to go back to New York and work in his family’s winery.
Ivy thought she and Nick would be together forever. Instead, Nick broke her heart and went back to New York alone.
Ivy was heartbroken, but she took that pain and transformed it into a script, When Mary Met Joseph. It took her five years of making the rounds with producers and studios, but she finally found a producer who believed in Ivy and her script. He found a couple of stars for the roles of Ilsa and Rick, a director, and the financing, and suddenly all of Ivy’s Hollywood dreams were coming true.
She got special permission to be on the set for filming, but she wondered if that was a good idea when she learned where the filming was going to take place. Instead of finding some local exteriors to shoot, finishing the interiors on a set in L.A., they were taking the shoot on location. And the location they chose was the small New York town where Ivy had grown up. Where Ivy had first fallen in love with Nick. They even pick Shepherd’s Winery as one of the locations for the shoot
But as the days of the shoot go by, complications arise. Ivy and the producer Drew try to keep their relationship under wraps, but that means she doesn’t get to spend much time with him. The actor playing Nick is stalked by his fans and can get no privacy. The actress playing Ilsa starts flirting with Nick and posts photos of them together all over her social media. And most distracting of all, Ivy finds herself in places that remind her of all those happy years that she and Nick had together. And while the ending of her movie has Rick get killed, Ivy is starting to wonder if she shouldn’t rewrite the ending of her own relationship with Nick Shepherd.
The Summer of Christmas is a light-hearted Christmas rom com in the spirit of those Hallmark holiday movies that are so popular, written by a couple of screenwriters who have scripted a few of those movies themselves. Juliet Giglio and Keith Giglio have brought a Hollywood Christmas to New York in July and written a story of love, regret, heartbreak, and redemption in a gift-wrapped package.
I really wanted to love this book. I am interested in the behind-the-scenes of a movie set, and I thought that was interesting. The love story was cute, if a little obvious. But I thought that it as a little overwritten. The writers worked hard to explain a lot of things about movie making that I think most readers already know (for example, I didn’t need to be told what IMDB is). But it is still a fun story, a bit effervescent but with some interesting surprises. I would suggest reading an excerpt and see what you think, and if you like the writing, then make yourself a hot chocolate and dive right in.
Egalleys for The Summer of Christmas were provided by Sourcebooks Casablanca through NetGalley, with many thanks.
