The Christmas Room

The Christmas Room by Catherine Anderson   422 pages

This story starts as a romance between two people with considerable obstacles, but turns into much more.  It addresses the effects of loss of a spouse to cancer and how two different people survive that loss.  It is a love letter to Montana, detailing both the beauty and the difficulty of surviving there.  Cam, his teenage son Caleb, and his mother, Maddie, are basically camping out on land they purchased as they wait for the builders to start construction on their living spaces.  They’ve relocated from California after the death of Cam’s dad to cancer.  Cam stops one night at the local bar and grill for a drink and meets Kirsten.  They enjoy the encounter, but when he hears who her father is, he backs away.  Sam has a reputation of destroying any man who tries to date his daughter, even though she is twenty-six-years-old. Since his wife died of cancer six years’ ago, he has become so volatile that his daughter and one long-time couple are the only people left to run his enormous ranching operation.  Cam and Kirsten decide to meet secretly and their relationship grows, but when Sam discovers it and he can’t find Cam, he unleashes some of his wrath on Maddie.  She is not someone who puts up with such nonsense, so she gives it right back.  It takes a horrible accident to begin to move all of these people toward a future filled with love instead of loss and sorrow.