Star Bright! A Christmas Story - Softcover

Greeley, Andrew M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765305623 ISBN 13: 9780765305626

Publisher: Forge Books, 2004

Synopsis

It's beginning to look a lot like an American Christmas: unpleasant relatives, miserable travel, a slobbering dog-and one "harmless American of Irish origins," Jack Flanigan, who is reluctantly falling in love with a young Russian woman studying at Harvard.

She's spending Christmas alone in a foreign country, so he invites the dark-eyed beauty home to Chicago for the holiday. Even though it isn't Christmas in the Russian Orthodox calendar, she accepts!

What happens when she gets to Chicago and caught in the maelstrom of commercialized Yuletide? Enough to say, there's a tree, and a feast, and midnight Mass, and a gaggle of contentious Flanigans of all ages-who have the merriest Christmas ever-and nothing will ever be quite the same for any of them.

Especially for Jack.

About this title

About the Author:

Priest, sociologist, author, and journalist, Father Andrew M. Greeley (1928-2013) was the author of over 50 bestselling novels and more than 100 works of nonfiction. His novels include the Bishop Blackie Ryan series, including The Archbishop in Andalusia; the Nuala Anne McGrail series, including Irish Tweed; the O’Malley Family Saga, including A Midwinter’s Tale; and standalones such as Home for Christmas and The Cardinal Sins.

A leading spokesperson for generations of Catholics, Father Greeley unflinchingly urged his beloved Church to become more responsive to believers’ evolving concerns. He chronicled his service to the Church in two autobiographies, Confessions of a Parish Priest and Furthermore!

From Kirkus Reviews:

Prolific Father Greeley (Summer at the Lake, p. 401) takes a stab at It's a Wonderful Christmas and comes up . . . all charm and wit. Good Irish-Catholic Jack Flanigan, a third-year Russian major at Boston College, sees a beautiful, sad-eyed visiting student reading a Russian paper on a bench in Harvard Square and takes her out for tea and doughnuts. Her face spectacularly exotic, Odessa Tatiana Alexseevna Shyuskulya, an orphan, is in the States on a scholarship. Not long ago, her communist atheism was overwhelmed by God's grace descending upon her, making her a total believer . . . and far more comfortable with the idea of Her (God) being in every room and sitting at every table than good Irish-Catholic Jack can bear. When 21-year-old Odessa believes something, a force of nature fills her. So perhaps Jack has acted thoughtlessly in inviting her home for Christmas in Chicago with his good Irish family? Dad, a surgeon going off to Bosnia for Christmas, is a shanty Irish bigot. Brother Ed is a tall handsome jerk who fancies himself a University of Chicago intellectual. Sister Stephanie, a boring, spoiled-lazy, very beautiful flake, has an idiot husband, Joe, with a Harvard degree, who's a substitute teacher with longings to act and write, while teenage sister Brigid smokes pot and thinks she understands everything while understanding hardly half. Meantime, the main mode of conversation for Jack's lawyer mother, even during family brawls, is the cross-exam. This already hangs like a full Christmas bag, and Greeley distributes his dialogue masterfully. Though Odessa's innocence proves unbeatable, tension fades as the only question left becomes: Will Greeley find some conflict to resolve? (He doesn't.) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0765305623
• ISBN 13: 9780765305626
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128