That Old Emerald Mountain Magic by Cara Malone

That Old Emerald Mountain Magic by Cara Malone

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The good: This was a very readable book - hard to put down in fact.
The bad: The conflict point and separately the ending.

Emerald Mountain is in Colorado and operates as a ski resort. Two worlds will collide when a 'townie', who works at a resort there, and a 'rich family' interact with each other. Interact in the normal resort employee/resort guest way until the worlds literally collide more than the figurative suggested in the last sentence - when Joy, the resort shift supervisor, glides on a snow board hard and fast into Carmen, the rich resort guest, who had been stupidly standing in the middle of the ski slope (she wanted to get a selfie without actually having to ski.

Carmen (one of the two point of view characters), her father, and mother lived poor - the needing to use the homeless shelter food pantry kind of poor (though I don't think they ever lost their home) until Carmen was around 10 to 13 when one of the father's 'crazy' inventions took off and made the family rich. Carmen's twin sisters were born nine months after the windfall, and so never knew a life outside the wealthy cocoon. They, the twins, also never new a white Christmas and the parents, more the father, wants to give them a white Christmas before they grow too jaded to appreciate it (their Christmases up to this point have involved going to warm locations, mostly to Cancun (I suppose here I could insert something like 'my family spent Christmas in Cancun once, I remember Christmas church service in some temporary room at the hotel with like 10 others with the Spanish speaking priest, but this isn't about me'). At the time the family head to Emerald Mountain, Cameron is 22, and the twins are around the age of 13.

Meanwhile, the other point of view character Joy grew up in and has spent her whole life in Emerald Mountain village - and started working at the ski resort after high school. Right before the current season started, her roommate left the town to go join a rock band - her last local friend. Her family, in the form of her mother, now lives in Florida, so Joy's there in Emerald by herself and is wondering what next to do with her life - take up her manager's offer to get trained to move further up the resort job hierarchy, or move somewhere else (here's where I insert the part where Joy only has a high school education and has a good steady job that has massive advancement potentialagainst . . . whatever she could do elsewhere).

Right, so, amongst the Carmen family attempting to stick close to the massively huge itinerary put together by papa (and that also reminds me of my father), the family does snow related stuff - like taking the limo into Denver to shop for the day (wait, that's not snow related; well the did do some snow related stuff . . . eventually) some 'feelings' and stuff are felt between Carmen and Joy. Though they'll 'only' have a week to have their fling - since that's how long the family will be there.

Nice enough story. Kind of thin. Open-ended ending. The conflict point is because both main characters have the maturity of goldfish, and the story/book is open-ended because it isn't resolved before the end of the book.

Sex did occur. Certain amount of graphicness to the sex description but . . . how to put this . . . somewhat lacking in heat and stuff.

Rating: 3.85

December 11 2017



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