Brooke has dressed for the arrival she has been picturing for weeks: burgundy corduroy, a stack of gifts with red bows, the daughter stepping up to her parents’ porch like the heroine of a seasonal film. Instead she is in a hire car crawling through a Vermont blizzard, her eight-year-old is asking from the back seat whether they are all going to die, and her British husband is muttering about cowsheds. Seconds later the airbag hits her in the face and a bumper-size tin of shortbread hits him in the head. That is how The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan sets out its argument: the gap between the Christmas people plan and the one they actually get.
The family stumbles through the snow to the only lit house for miles, a turreted place in a hollow near the village of Sugarbrook. A second car piles into theirs within the hour, delivering a Boston home stager called Izzy and Jason, the photographer she works with and very much does not want to talk to. Their host is Mabel, a widow who lives alone with four black cats, owns no tree and has no intention of celebrating anything. The novel is out now (22 October 2026 from HQ in the UK; MIRA publishes it in North America).
Mothers, Daughters and the Best Christmas Ever
The thread that makes The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan worth reading is Brooke’s. She is an only child who moved to London for love, and ten years on she still cannot finish a phone call with her mother without feeling she has failed some test. Morgan writes that pressure with real precision. The call from the children’s bedroom is a small masterpiece of guilt: every sentence her mother says is loving, and every one lands as a reproach. Matt, sitting on the edge of the bed later, tells Brooke she becomes someone else whenever her parents are involved, and the observation stings because it is fair.
What lifts this above a seasonal sketch is that Morgan builds a mirror. Mabel, it slowly emerges, has a rift of her own, and her account of how a mother’s fear can curdle into control is the same story Brooke is living, viewed from the other side. Brooke watches her own daughter Elsie, a sharp and anxious child who records every word the adults say, and starts to wonder what she is passing on.
The children carry a lot of the warmth. Elsie spots at once that their host looks exactly like Tripalot, the clumsy witch from the picture books her mother grew up on, and will not stop saying so. Four-year-old Poppy twirls through every room and names any black cat she meets after her soft toy. Neither is a cute prop; both are funny, and Elsie in particular drives the plot more than any adult does. Morgan’s ear for how children actually talk is one of the reasons The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan never tips into syrup.
The Turret Room Problem
The second thread of The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan is the romance, and it is a deliberate counterweight. Izzy is relentlessly cheerful in public and alone in private, raised by a father who never wanted her, and she ends relationships before anyone can end them for her. Her trouble begins before the crash: a message meant for a friend, joking about being trapped in a snowdrift with Jason, goes to the entire company chat. She spends the next hundred pages wondering if he read it.
Then Mabel puts the two of them in the only spare bedroom, a turret lined with built-in bookshelves and a curved window seat, with one very large bed. It is a forced-proximity setup that Morgan clearly enjoys, and the early scenes have real comic snap. Jason is patient and steady and plainly wants to talk about something that happened between them last summer. Izzy keeps finding urgent reasons to help in the kitchen. A misheard phone call through a closed door does exactly what misheard phone calls do in this genre.
Staging houses is Izzy’s job, so when Brooke says the place needs to look like Christmas, she takes it as a brief. A box of fairy lights from the photo shoot, paper stars, a dusty old tree from the attic: the slow dressing of a house that has refused the season for years is one of the book’s quiet pleasures, and it gives Izzy a way to belong before she can admit she wants to. Few scenes in The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan are as quietly satisfying as the first evening the lights go up.
Where The Best Christmas Ever Gives Ground
- Izzy’s retreat is one beat, played many times. She is tempted, remembers her childhood, decides she is unlovable and pulls away. After a genuine breakthrough midway, she relapses and runs the cycle again, and by the last third the pattern is predictable.
- Jason talks her through her own psychology. His long, kind speeches explain Izzy to herself, so the romance resolves mostly in dialogue rather than through anything she chooses to do until the very end.
- The family conflicts give way quickly. A decade of pressure from Brooke’s mother turns around in a single conversation, and the late resolutions in general arrive with very little resistance.
- Matt has little to do. He is the steady husband and little else.
Read These Next
- Anxious People by Fredrik Backman for strangers trapped together who end up as an unlikely family.
- You Make It Feel Like Christmas by Sophie Sullivan for another holiday romance where the season does the matchmaking.
- A Married Little Christmas by Abby Jimenez for a lighter, funnier December with snow and very loud families.
About Sarah Morgan
Morgan is a British novelist and a former nurse who started writing after the birth of her first son. She has published more than eighty novels since 2000, moving from category romance to women’s fiction. The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan returns her to Vermont snow, a setting she has used before. Readers who like her family dynamics should try A Merry Little Lie for more festive family chaos and Other People’s Summers for her take on female friendship.
- Her nursing background shaped many of her early medical romances.
- Miracle on 5th Avenue won a RITA Award in 2017.
- How to Keep a Secret won the RITA for mainstream fiction with a central romance in 2019.
- Sleigh Bells in the Snow (2013), the first O’Neil Brothers book, is set at a struggling family ski resort in Vermont.
The Verdict
The storm in this book is an old-fashioned nor’easter, and Morgan uses it the way such storms work in life, as an excuse nobody can argue with. Seven people are let off the Christmas they thought they owed someone, and each has to work out what they wanted instead.
The Best Christmas Ever by Sarah Morgan is strongest when it stays with mothers and daughters, and weakest when the romance repeats a step it has already taken. The ending is generous and a little too neat, which, for a Christmas novel, many readers will count as a feature. Read it in the week before the holidays, ideally when your own plans are starting to wobble.
