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A Puppy Is Just for Christmas
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When Will There Be Good News?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past
Appearances vs. Reality
Lies and Deceptions
Family
Summary
Analysis
Reggie spends Christmas at the Hunters’. Dr. Hunter gives Reggie a brand-new PowerBook. (Billy had gifted her one before, but then he’d stolen it back.) Jackson Brodie had given Reggie a check for a lot more than she’d lent him, but when she tried to deposit it in her account, the check bounced. Reggie thinks that Jackson “still belonged to her, but she wasn’t sure she wanted him anymore.”
Reggie finally gets her wish and is welcomed into the Hunter household. She doesn’t know the full story behind Jackson’s travails, so when his promised check bounces, she figures he wasn’t as honest as she’d believed him to be.
Themes
Dr. Hunter is letting Reggie stay there for now, until she finds someplace else, but she says that perhaps she’d like to stay for good. They never talk about what happened at the house in Penicuik. Reggie doesn’t know what happened inside the house or whose blood Dr. Hunter was covered with. She just reads about the mystery of the burned-out house in the newspaper and wonders. No matter how many times the police question her, Dr. Hunter just claims that she went for a walk and “suffered some kind of amnesia.”
Though Reggie has realized her dream of getting to be part of the Hunter family, there’s an ambivalence about it, too—she must suspect that there’s more to Dr. Hunter’s story than Joanna reveals, yet hearing the story could potentially damage Dr. Hunter in Reggie’s eyes. There’s an implied distance between them now, too, much as there is between Louise and Jackson.
Themes
It’s the best Christmas Reggie has ever had. Ms. MacDonald’s funeral had been just before Christmas. Nobody mentioned that she’d caused the Musselburgh train crash. After the funeral, Reggie has a moment alone by the coffin and tucks the little plastic bags of heroin she’d found in the Loeb Classics into the coffin. It had come out to more than a kilo, which would have added up to a lot of money. Ginger and Blondie had never figured out that there was literally a library of drugs hidden in Ms. MacDonald’s house. In Ms. MacDonald’s will, she leaves half the proceeds from the sale of her house to Reggie, so Reggie now has a college fund.
It turns out that Ms. MacDonald’s Loeb classics had been stuffed with drugs, so Reggie makes sure they’re disposed of. Meanwhile, Ms. MacDonald has made it possible for Reggie to fulfill her dream of college—showing that she really cared about Reggie, and that Reggie’s care for her was appreciated, too.
Themes
Dr. Hunter asks Reggie what Billy is doing for Christmas. Reggie wonders how Dr. Hunter knows about Billy. It’s just one more puzzle.
Reggie had always taken care to conceal Billy’s existence from Dr. Hunter. This apparent slip on Dr. Hunter’s part just deepens the mystery, and it’s another detail that is never resolved in the book.
Themes
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Neil has been charged with arson and is staying at a B&B while Dr. Hunter decides whether she’ll take him back, though it’s pretty clear she’s already decided. Dr. Hunter says fiercely that if her husband had been kidnapped, she would have done anything to get him back. Reggie knows that she, too, is now one of the family circle for whom Dr. Hunter would do anything.
Dr. Hunter and Neil are estranged, apparently for good. Reggie has now taken the place in the Hunter household that she’s coveted and that Neil has left behind. She’ll finally have a peaceful, stable family life.
Themes
