I love novels that can pay homage to source material and transform it into something unique. The Eight Heartbreaks of Hankkah is just such a book.

This story tackles some complex subjects – death, abortion, fatal illness in a child, and divorce – with humour and sympathy.

Evelyn Schwartz isn’t a Scrooge, but she is directing/producing one for television. She has eight days to rehearse a live-action musical of A Christmas Carol into perfection before the studio goes on air with it. That’s how she will spend Hanukkah this year: working sixteen to twenty hours a day to create a fantastic holiday memory for others. In fairness, creating fantastic memories for others is pretty much how she spends most of her time.

When she literally runs into a piano and passes out, she’s taken to the medical bay and awakens later with a doozy of a headache she is convinced is one of her chronic migraines. Unable to open her eyes due to light sensitivity, it takes her a while to discover that the sexy voice talking her through her recent accident and current ailments isn’t the usual studio doctor, but her ex-husband, David Adler. He’s filling in while the other guy visits a dying grandma in India.

David isn’t surprised to find Evelyn is his first patient, nor that she had walked straight into a piano. She’s a workaholic who’s always been laser-focused on her career and can’t ever see what’s right in front of her unless it has the word promotion stamped across it in sequins. He’s surprised she even noticed he was missing when he walked out on her two years ago, and has always wondered just how long it took her to realize he’d gone. It’s not like she was ever home often enough for him to mention he was leaving.

Evelyn is none too thrilled to have David on set, insisting that the dissolution of their marriage was his fault and that the way he handled it has left her with zero closure. However, in the spirit of Christmas/Hanukkah/needs must, she advises him that she will maintain a professional facade around him and sincerely hopes she won’t have to return to the medical bay. David advises her that she would do well to consider that she might have a concussion, not just one of her usual migraines. Evelyn assures him that if she has any atypical symptoms, she’ll get herself checked out at a hospital – but they both know she’s lying. She’d never take that kind of time off work.

The first hallucination happens that night. Her deceased boss, Marla, shows up, literally chained to a phone and various computers. Marla advises Evelyn that eight ghosts of Hanukkah’s past will visit her and that Evelyn would do well to heed their advice – or she will spend eternity shackled the way Marla is.

Evelyn wakes up in her office, convinced that stress, lack of sleep, and the still-present migraine have induced the hallucination. And then the first ghost appears…

Technically, I lied at the start of this review. Evelyn might not be a grouch or a miser, but she is Scrooge-like in her insistence on placing her career before all else. Her long hours and total dedication, along with founding the mentoring organization, Women in Film & Television, are partly her way of making it easier for the ladies who come after her, but they are also her escape from a life full of messy memories she’d just as soon suppress. The ghosts feel she’s been avoiding her problems long enough and force some therapeutic closure on her.

Readers are taken through Evelyn’s childhood and teenage friendship with David, their reconnection after college, their wedding day, and then all the things that led to their divorce. Some moments are sweet, some are sad, and some are silly, and all of them showed me an Evelyn I didn’t really like. While David is smart, kind, giving, and generous with his time and energy, Evelyn is completely self-focused. She made every moment in their lives about how she felt and about her career. It wasn’t just David who was short-changed by this; she literally had no friends who weren’t work friends, and her mother never rated any of her time over the holidays. Evelyn didn’t know Marla well enough to write a decent eulogy for her, and her assistant producer serves more as a prop to showcase Evelyn’s outstanding mentorship than anything else.

That may well have been deliberate on the part of the author. At one point, the actor playing Scrooge in the production tells us:

“A Christmas Carol is about revisiting our memories through the lens of someone else. Scrooge doesn’t change because of the ghosts, he changes because he understands that a woman once loved him, that a father grieves for his sick and dying son, that his actions from being a misser affect people, and the world, around him. He changes because he experiences the heartbreaks of life from a perspective outside of his own.”

Much like Scrooge, perhaps we aren’t meant to like Evelyn completely at the start, but to enjoy her journey to being a better version of herself. The author makes that journey funny through the rather silly ghosts and the craziness Evelyn finds herself in when she isn’t hopping through the past. She is also a far more sympathetic character than Scrooge. She may be closed off and selfish, but she’s been through a lot to reach that point. The novel tackles some dark subjects, much like its source material, but the author’s skill level is such that she helps us see the joy and light despite the pain. And David is such a wonderful person; he’s a lovely counterbalance for Evelyn and a complete delight to spend time with.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being almost no mention of God and ten being a sermon masquerading as a novel, this is a six or seven. Judaism plays a prominent role in how David interacts with life, and Evelyn’s anger towards God influences how she reacts to it. The author also provides some info dumps on how the faith views life, abortion, and grieving.

The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah is a thought-provoking, heartfelt novel sure to put you in the holiday spirit. I recommend it to everyone who enjoys funny, contemporary novels.