Review: Small Town Politics Puts Romance on the Back Burner
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 5, 2013
In a word this story is rather dull - it's one that's been done over and over again in Lifetime Christmas movies time and time again...sure the stories may have been flip flopped with the big wig aka Marcus being the female lead and the man aka Ivy being the small town hero returned, finding themselves thrust into a situation they never expected.  Ivy and Marcus this time take the reins and run with the story.  Whether it was Ivy doing everything she could to fight Marcus' pursuit of her romantically or her underhanded way of swinging the town council's vote away from Megamart?  Or Marcus doing everything he could to pursue Ivy, deceive her family and the town, all the while trying to decipher his Uncle's semi-coded lies. The politics of the situation in this story is what turned me off more than anything, I found myself struggling to find something to latch onto - could it be the love triangle between Ivy-Marcus-Preston? Or Herman's drunkenness and the mystery of a "secret" he's hiding? Or Ivy's Mother and Grandmother's meddling in her relationship that make them endearing?  I have yet to decide.  In the end Marcus and Ivy's relations hip takes a backseat to the Megamart-Celebration-Parliament Bakery problems.The author's style of writing and the detail in which she described everything in Celebration made it so that I could place myself right in the town square, inside the Callahan home, or in Herman's decrepit Victorian.  She built a back story and history to the characters that tied them all together smoothly and integrated each history into the story and why each individual found themselves not wanting Megamart to come to Celebration.  The story itself was told perfectly!  I just wish that there was more to it than an overdone theme from just about every poor Christmas movie ever made.