Review - Winter Oranges by Marie Sexton

Onetime child star, now B-list actor Jason wants to escape Hollywood, at least for a little while. He buys a house in the far north of Idaho, but soon after moving in, he sees someone at the window of the guest room over the garage. Fearing a paparazzi, Jason asks the sheriff to investigate, but she can’t find anyone in the room. Perhaps it’s haunted. Ben is no ghost. He’s been trapped inside a snow globe since the eve of the civil war, only able to project himself into the room where the globe is kept. Ben has witnessed over 150 years of history, but Jason is the first one that can see Ben’s projection. Shock and curiosity soon turn to something more, but it doesn’t take long for Jason to find out it’s very difficult to have a relationship with a man that nobody else can see.

This novel is a new (to me) take on the ghost / time loop stories. It was very easy to just accept the magical setup and get into the story of Ben and Jason’s complex relationship. Aside from the fantasy angle, the plot is very rooted in contemporary American pop culture, with celebrities behaving badly (or being made to appear to) and the constant attention of social media.

We get the story entirely from Jason’s point of view. I thought the picture we get of a former child star whose career has gone downhill was very believable. It’s easy to sympathize with Jason’s dilemma. Life as a B-list actor is precarious at best, but it’s all he knows. Jason is surprisingly accepting of Ben’s sudden appearance, yet it’s hard to deny what he is seeing.

We only know Ben through Jason’s interaction with him. Over the course of the story, the young man shares quite a lot of his long history stuck in the globe. Once we hear most of his story, Ben’s time trapped in the globe reminded me, at least a little, of The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Edmund Dantés, Ben is “imprisoned” for a very long time, and for a while, goes mad. His journey through depression feels entirely realistic.

This is a romance, so of course there has to be a happy ending. There’s a strong clue about how they’re going to get there about halfway through the story, but of course Jason doesn’t figure it out until it’s almost too late.

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“Winter Oranges” is available from Amazon (commissionable link).