A review by tasharobinson
A Lot Like Christmas: Stories by Connie Willis

4.0

I took my time with this one over the course of more than a year because while I love Connie Willis' romantic twists and constant surprises, reading too many of her short stories back to back starts to feel like eating too much candy at once. These stories lean heavily on screwball comedy, and a love of overwhelmed and exhausted protagonists dealing with more input and demands than they can process, usually because everyone around them is being unreasonable — and experiencing too much of that at once can make it all feel similar, and can normalize the anxiety and intensity in a way that works against what the stories are trying to do. Read in isolation, though, with rest breaks to bring down that anxiety level, these are wonderful stories, rarely about Christmas, but set at Christmas, usually with the extra level of anxiety that brings. They range from a futuristic Holmesian drawing-room mystery to a Short Cuts-style "everything is connected" series of scenes set during a worldwide blizzard. There are romantic-comedy stories and a religious story (which cut off just as it felt like it was getting somewhere), all with an overall tone of bright farce and sincere good will. Also a whole lot of recommendations for specific Christmas books, movies, and TV, coming both from Willis and from her characters.