"A Betty Neels Christmas" actually contains two stories written by, of course, Betty Neels. They are "A Christmas Proposal," and "A Winter Wedding." Both are stories about handsome, older, mature doctors who eventually fall in love with plain looking, gentle hearted women who believe that no one will ever ask them to marry. These two stories follow the same general plotline of practically every Betty Neels story that I've read so far: a plain looking woman (often a nurse) harbours an impossible attraction to an older accomplished and handsome man (usually a doctor, and usually of Dutch descent). Eventually, somehow, the plain looking nurse catches the doctor's attention, but is unaware of her effect on the doctor. She believes herself to be unable to compete with another gorgeous woman who appears to be a more suitable mate for the doctor.
All you have to do is substitute the names of Bertha Soames (who is not a nurse, but rather a sheltered young woman who is also plain looking), and Oliver Hayes-Smith (an English doctor, not Dutch) into "A Christmas Proposal." Bertha is competing with her step-sister, Clare, for the attentions of the doctor. In "A Winter Wedding," Emily Seymour, a plain looking, but competent nurse, and Professor Renier Jurres-Romeijn (definitely a Dutch doctor) are the characters that appear in that story. Renier has to convince Emily that he is not interested in two other girls who vie for his attention, one of whom is her own sister, Louisa.
Both stories are contemporary, but they seem to take place (in my opinion) in the sixties...maybe up until the eighties. There is no mention of the electronic devices that we are familiar with today (no cell phones, smart phones, Blackberry machines, iPods, etc., although there are references to getting bleeped (I assume this is from a pager of some sort). Social media is not mentioned at all. Of course, Betty Neels passed on in 2001, before the advent of Facebook.
I like that Betty Neels' stories are clean, but I find some of her heroines to be pushovers. Bertha Soames falls into this category. Other heroines are more belligerent when the hero says something that hurts their feelings as Darcy does to Elizabeth in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice when he declares that she is not handsome enough to tempt him. Emily Seymour fits this type.
As for Oliver and Renier, both act similarly enough in that they really make it difficult for their respective objects of affections to realize that they are interested in them...especially when the men appear to continue paying court to the competition. I sometimes find this a bit annoying: when the men discover that their ladyloves misunderstand the nature of the relationships with the competition, they often continue to allow the heroines to remain unenlightened about their real feelings. Often there is a big reveal later, which is usually tied to some big romantic gesture that the men do to demonstrate the depth of their affections. There's only so much extra angst that I can take, and I think that reading the same formulaic development in each of these stories has left me rather unenthusiastic about the women being kept in the dark and having their romantic suffering prolonged every time. I wonder what would have happened if a male lead actually revealed the truth of his feelings right when he realized that there was a misunderstanding, or if a female lead recognized the feelings of the hero rather than remaining obtuse and clueless.
That being said, I will probably still continue reading Betty Neels' books. As I mentioned before, they are clean, and I enjoy the romantic tension that is built between the heroes and heroines in her novels.
