
Member Reviews

This is a second chance romance, where the main protagonists were a couple in high school, which in a small rural town can feel as binding as marriage (and in many cases, leads to marriages neither party really wants), until Ben went away to college and broke up with Olivia. It is now over fifteen years, and a lifetime later, when both have returned home for different reasons, that circumstances bring them together again.
Despite the frothy cover and generic Christmassy title, the book deals with some pretty serious issues within families and communities, and with what it can mean to be part of either.
The story is told from several characters’ point of view; obviously the two main protagonists’, Olivia and Ben, but also from Ben’s stepson, Carson’s, and that of chief of police Phil Weigand’s.
Beware: copaganda; addiction; mental health issues; death of a parent; mentions of miscarriages and infertility; slut shaming.
This book is the kind of contemporary romance I enjoy, where there are a number of plot threads that run parallel for part of the book, then cross or tangle with each other, then go their own way again, because each of the characters in the story has their own life, with their own history, and relationships, and therefore react differently to the same events.
The blurb omits one of the key plot threads in the book: in a brief prologue set shortly before the novel proper starts, the body of an unidentified teenage girl is found in the woods near the town, literally frozen to death. It is now several weeks later, and the cops still have no leads to how she came to be there, let alone who she is.
The mystery of the dead girl–who she is, why she was in Crescent Creek, and who knows more about both of those question than they’ve told–exposes all sorts of cracks in the wholesome façade of town life.
I was immediately sucked in by the writing; the characters are good people, but they are also very real, struggling with serious issues of ethics, fairness, and justice, as it pertains both their personal relationships and the community at large.
Worldbuilding is another one of Ms Johnson’s strengths; the story is set in a small town that reflects the reality of rural life in the U.S., from limited higher education opportunities to struggling businesses to scarcity of employment, as well as the pervasive “it’s not who you are but who you know” thing.
“…she asked…how he’d gotten himself hired as principal when he was younger than most of the teachers at the high school. …”I wouldn’t have had a chance at a position as principal anywhere but here, not so soon. I gather they weren’t getting many quality applicants, and, well, I was the hometown boy.” (Ben’s point of view, chapter 3)
“In small-town America, “Going Out of Business” signs were more common than transfers of ownership were.” (Ben’s point of view, chapter 3)
A lot of the other problems with small town living–the immutability of social status and acceptance, extra conservative thinking, everyone knowing everyone else’s business, for good or ill, etc.–are actually given plenty of page space, without the pretense that there is only one or two “bad apples”, and more like the every day reality of any large enough group of people.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the author, a small town dweller by choice, won’t romanticize the setting as one that guarantees community, simply by virtue of being a small rural town, and therefore, having “good values”.
“In all the years since leaving Crescent Creek, she’d been a city dweller who had become accustomed to being surrounded by strangers. She had forgotten what it was like to be part of a whole instead of always stading apart.” (Olivia’s point of view, chapter 4)
Another strength in the author’s writing is that her characters feel real; they may be good people with heroic qualities (which I enjoy very much in my genre fiction), but they are by no means perfect. The two main characters are in their early thirties and generally behave like adults with each other, but the history between them does play a part in how they react when the fecal matter hits the aeration device.
After Ben essentially dumped her, Olivia graduated high school and went away to college herself, and from there worked for a large corporation for years, slowly climbing the company ladder, until her father had a massive heart attack. Being an only child, she quit her job and returned home to help run the family business as her father recovered.
Almost a year later, her father has died, family secrets that explain the unbearable tension between her parents during the last few months have come to light, and Olivia has begun to question everything she thought she knew about herself and her family, even as her future remains in limbo until her mother makes up her mind about the hardware store.
The family dynamics, that seemed so idyllic to Olivia for most of her life, now feel too superficial and fragile to survive this crisis.
Olivia is angry with her mother, and even as she’s grieving for her father, she’s angry over his actions. On top of which, she is justifiably bitter about her current circumstances: she put her own life on hold to come help run her father’s hardware store, which kept her parents fed and in their home. But now that her father is dead, her mother is selling the house, and likely the business as well, essentially kicking Olivia to the curb.
Ben is essentially a decent guy who has always felt regretted breaking up with Olivia; currently the principal of the town’s high school; he returned to town for various reasons, one of them being that he has sole custody of his stepson, and as his parents still live there, he has a small but reliable support network to help raise Carson, as his birth mother is a mess.
Ben wants to start a new relationship with Olivia, but, to protect Carson–who, he suspects, knows more than he’s telling about the dead girl in the woods–he sometimes withholds what he knows from her–which isn’t exactly conducive to a healthy relationship between adults.
For his part, Carlson has come to accept that he can’t save his mother, that Ben does love him, and that living in Crescent Creek is not all bad. Except that, as a member of the varsity basketball team, Carson has been pressured by teammates into participating in some “youthful hijinks”, and now he’s backed into a corner by the two most popular players in the team.
As the story progresses, and things come to a head, there is a third act separation that actually makes sense, because the characters are reacting to the cumulative effect of other events in their lives as much as to what is happening between them. And eventually, everyone actually talks to each other honestly, which solves most of the problems between them.
It is also worth noting that while the story starts a few days after Thanksgiving, ending sometime in January, and both the Bowen and Hovik families celebrate Christmas, there is no “magic of the season” trope, or indeed, any mention of the religious implications of the holiday at all.
Even though the author explains in the foreword that her inspiration came from a real case of a town coming together to pay for a cemetery plot for an unidentified girl, some of the plotlines in the story seem to try to address, with varying levels of success, a number of different scandals that had come to light not long before the book was written, which had brought systemic problems to the surface of national discourse (racism, rape culture, the national obsession with sports and how they shape identity for both individuals and communities, etc).
It was good to see condom positivity for all the characters as part of the story, but I’m not happy with the slut shaming that went hand-in-hand with it. And while it was great to see a man stand up for a child who had no blood ties to him, the treatment of the mother’s mental health issues was pretty terrible.
I also struggled with how infertility and miscarriages show up in the story; and while I can see why the author chose to have Olivia’s mother take responsibility for the marital problems that led to her father’s infidelity, I was not happy about it–but then, I generally have issues when it comes to how genre romance treats forgiveness.
On balance, and despite my quibbles, this is a solid romance; I believe that the characters have a strong chance of having a happy life together, and that Carson will as well.
One Frosty Night gets 8.00 out of10

One Frosty Night by Janice Kay Johnson is the sort of a book that exists to punish me for having a ridiculous TBR pile. Had I read this book back when it was newly published, I think I would have liked it a lot better. Don't get me wrong, what Johnson does well (she's dynamite at writing conflict) is on full display here - but it doesn't always mesh well with the romance and quite frankly I found a lot of the secondary characters rather gross.
Olivia Bowen came home to Crescent Creek, Washington to run the family hardware store after Dad's health began to fail. Shortly before her father finally passed, the body of a young girl was discovered out in the woods. As if that wasn't shocking enough for the small community, nobody knows who the girl is, how she ended up in the woods, or even how she died. It's like she just curled up outside in the snow and froze to death.
Ben Hovik is the high school principal and ever since Jane Doe's body was found, the teenagers in the community have been acting strangely - including his stepson, Carson. He raises money to give the girl a proper burial, is keeping his ear to the ground, but continues to be distracted by Olivia. He came home to Crescent Creek after gaining custody of Carson hoping to reunite with his first love - a complicated prospect since it was Ben who broke up with her after he left for college and she was stuck back in Crescent Creek because she was still in high school. Needless to say, she's not terribly anxious to let him back into her life and besides, she's got problems of her own. Her relationship with her mother has become incredibly strained since her father died, and the woman just dropped the bomb on her that she plans to sell the family home and business as soon as possible.
If you're familiar with Janice Kay Johnson's work at all, you'll know she doesn't write happy sunshine fluff books. So I can't help but think that the cozy outdoor sledding scene that screams "meet cute!" on the cover does this book a huge disservice. Also, I wouldn't go so far as to say the author "struggles" with the tone of this story - but it's easy to get whiplash going from a burgeoning reunion romance to the harsh realities of an unidentified dead teenage girl found out in the woods!
It takes a while for the conflict and plot to gain some forward momentum, and once it does we're then regaled with characters behaving in a gross manner. Look, is this the author's fault? No. I mean, how was she to know when she was writing this book that 2016-2018 was going to happen and I was going to be full-up on gross people always seeming to "fail up" in life. The high school students were bad enough - but then they're teenagers. No, it was the adults in this story - specifically Olivia's mother who made me SO VERY ANGRY to the point of seething. I was so tempted to give up on this story because it was all so unsavory and...well, gross.
But this is Janice Kay Johnson and gods bless her - she can write the hell out of some conflict. Once everything comes bursting out into the open, I couldn't tear myself away from this story. I had to keep reading to see how it would all end. Also, if romance readers are brutally honest with ourselves, we know the genre has a nasty habit of romanticizing (I mean, it's what the genre DOES!). If you're fed up with idealized small towns, yeah - this is your book. Johnson does not romanticize Crescent Creek in the slightest. She writes about all the crap that makes small towns annoying - certain small-minded citizens, everybody all up in your business, the mean-spirited gossip, the obsession with high school sports, the lack of opportunity and dying main streets. Crescent Creek is not a town with cutesy cupcake shops that somehow miraculously seem to stay in business even though the population is maybe a couple thousand.
Unfortunately, the good stuff tends to get overshadowed by the bad. While it's not blatant, I couldn't help but feel that Ben's ex-wife (Carson's Mom) was demonized for her addiction and mental health issues. Also, there's some veiled slut-shaming of a high school girl that bothered me. Does all this crap go on in small towns? Yes (heck, everywhere - small towns don't hold the monopoly) - but again: Wendy Tired of Gross People.
The ending felt lackluster. Almost like Johnson may possibly have been setting up a series (or at least a book 2) that, from what I can tell, didn't happen. There's one rather large nugget in particular that doesn't get answered and since it's a BIG DEAL for the majority of the story, it's pretty hard to swallow.
So yeah. In the end I'm left with a feeling of malaise. Is this terrible? No. I don't think Johnson is capable of writing terrible. But it's also nowhere near as good as she's capable of. The darkness of the conflict doesn't really mesh with the romance and Wendy Tired of Gross People made this one hard going in parts. If it's in your TBR? Look, you've probably got worse there and this isn't anywhere near a disaster. But if you don't own it? I'm not necessarily going to say you need to drop your life and one-click this baby either.
Final Grade = C