Book 9: The Starseekers by Nicole Glover

Well, sometimes you read a book for book club and every single person shows up and says that didn't work for me!!! and it's a good time. This book is kind of like Hidden Figures but it's also a murder mystery and magic and also Indiana Jones and also allegedly a romance? And if you think that sounds like too many genres it sure is; there are seven different plots and not a lick of narrative urgency in any of them, unfortunately. The best I can say for it is that it was nice to read a contemporary piece of speculative fiction that wasn't a dystopia but also boy I wanted this to be better. 

Grade: C

Book 41: The Gentleman and his Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide

I confess that this was almost a DNF for me, but I decided that I wanted to know how it would resolve badly enough to stick with it. Do I regret that? A bit, but only because I am trying to become more ruthless in not spending my time with media I don't truly care about, because it turns out there is plenty out there that I genuinely love and why give my life over to things that don't work that well for me. It's a regency m/m romantasy and neither the romance nor the magic nor the setting really worked for me. Oh well!

Grade: C  

Book 25: The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

Sometimes I can't tell if a book doesn't totally work for me or if I've just read it badly. I really liked the world of The Folk of the Air series, even if that trilogy didn't quite land the way I wanted it to, so I was hoping that this would recapture my favorite aspects of that series. And while there are things I enjoyed it, I think it was just a bit more YA-focused than I was hoping for? The central character's main conflict never quite hit for me, and I spent most of my read basically waiting for the story to get to the big reveal at the end of it. I'm hoping that the sequel will build from that and end up creating a more satisfying story as a whole for me.

Grade: C

Book 12: Under the Mistletoe with You by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

Look, sometimes you need to end March with a gay Christmas romance novel, okay?

This one has a lot to recommend for it - it's got a baker named Christopher who lives in a quaint Welsh village. He gets snowed in with the famous actor Nash Nadeau there under a fake name who was supposed to stay at Christopher's apartment while he went home for Christmas. They clash! There's only one bed! They have to figure out how to work together to help the village! Christopher hides that he knows who Nash is! 

This book is extremely cozy, and it's lovely to have a lead character who's trans and not have that be the big message of the book. But for me, the balance of small village pre-Christmas stuff to romance wasn't quite what I was looking for - the two leads didn't have the kind of chemistry I was hoping for, and while they each had personal obstacles they had to get past, it didn't feel like they found the answers in each other. Plus, and this is just a particular pet peeve for me, Nash never sounded like an American (or a Canadian who moved to LA when he was a teenager) to me. I'm sure that the reverse happens for British readers all the time, but I wish his dialogue and internal monologue had been more carefully written to be that of a non-British person. 

Grade: C   

Book 6: The Christmas Swap by Talia Samuels

This is almost a really sweet and satisfying Christmas romance novel before it kind of falls apart in the end, sadly. Margot and her girlfriend break up right before the holidays, so when one of her clients asks her to be his fake girlfriend at his rich parents' home for Christmas, she says yes. All goes well until she meets Ben's hot gay sister Ellie, oh no! Ellie thinks she's a gold digger but is also drawn to her, of course. 

I thought this novel was going to avoid most of the worst pitfalls of this genre when Ben and Margot confess that they're faking it at about the midway point, long before Margot and Ellie actually kiss, but then the final conflict and resolution is so both overdone and underbaked that the whole thing falls flat. Not mad I read it, but it could have been much better with a bit more work, for me. 

Grade: C 

Book 4: It's a Fabulous Life by Kelly Farmer

As is probably obvious from the title of this Christmas romance novel, it's a take on It's a Wonderful Life. But instead of an actual angel, we have a group of drag queens who need to get the wings of their costume, and the small town has a sad lesbian who never got to leave the town to go out and experience the world because her dad died her senior year of high school, and the love interest is the girl who got away from high school who's just moved back. 

There's a lot in this that's cute, but the central conceit really falls apart in this version of it. We're supposed to think that by the end Bailey George (yes, really) will of course be happier if she stays in Lanford Falls and never leaves or moves to a different town (let alone city or country like her dream was), and that literally the entire town will fall apart and stop thriving if she leaves. And you can kind of buy it in the movie version, that a small town banker really could be the thing to keep an entire town and family together. But the book doesn't actually want to get as dark and sad as the movie does, and as a result both the low point and the catharsis fall flat. I have read this kind of movie romance novel adaptation many times, and this one unfortunately both misses the emotional impact of the movie and also doesn't give us new characters who make me feel anything different. Bah. 

Grade: C

Book 3: Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake

Exes who reunite is one of my favorite romance novel tropes, and it pairs especially well with a Christmas romance, since it's so easy to dwell on the past during the season and people end up seeing old friends and family in a way that makes an unexpected reunion more likely. But the big pitfall is always whether the reason they broke up in the past still exists, and whether forgiveness etc. can actually be had. 

Unfortunately, for me this book really failed on that front. Charlotte and Brighton were childhood best friends who became high school sweethearts and got engaged their senior year of college, and then Brighton left Charlotte at the altar, and I never came close to thinking that Charlotte should forgive Brighton for it. The explanation that Charlotte was also sort of at fault for not seeing that Brighton was miserable living in New York doesn't make up for that, and they can't fix any of that with good sex. 

It's also the sort of romance novel where they exist basically in a vacuum - there's a queer social group of sorts, but apparently neither of them had any other friends aside from each other in high school or college, and it honestly all just made me kind of angry by the end. I had high hopes but the central conflict and resolution just fundamentally did not work for me, which makes it a hard sell in the end. 

Grade: C

Book 27: The Mistletoe Mystery by Nita Prose

This is a Christmas-themed novella set in the same universe as The Maid, and everything that I (despite my misgivings) ended up making my peace with in that book are back in this story and much, much worse. So! It was not be saved by the fact that it's a Christmas-themed story--I started to call it a mystery, but it's not. The only suspense in the book is the fact that Molly is unable to see that everything odd that's happening is because her boyfriend is trying to propose to her, but she doesn't see, but the reader sure does, and honestly it just made me think that if you are dating someone who (understandably!) needs things stated explicitly and clearly to you, you're doing a bad job if you try to keep secrets, even if it's in service of something nice, i.e. a proposal. This was the last book I read this year and no thank you!

Grade: C

Book 22: Fire and Blood by George R. R. Martin

So about halfway through the second season of House of the Dragon, I decided that I really wanted to just read the 'history' that the show was based on, because I was tired of only sort of understanding who all the characters were and also I wanted to know in advance what the bad things were. The show has the same problem that most prequels do, which is that it's the story of how the world arrived at the terrible situation that the main story starts in, so it's inherently tragic and we know where the story has to end up. But I've been enjoying the show, and I'm a big fan of the style of book that Fire and Blood is; I love a fake narrative historical book, which cites differing accounts and tells us what happens but can't actually confirm why they do. 

The first thing to note is that the book is extremely long and dense - the story arc that the show is based on doesn't even start for two hundred and fifty pages, and then it continues for another two hundred, more or less. I did enjoy the first parts of the book, though, which is essentially the equivalent of the Norman Conquest, an event that I know sufficiently little about to not be bothered by how much (or how little) GRRM is lifting from real history. But then I finally got to the part of the story that's been adapted, and I discovered almost immediately that I vastly prefer the show to the book, and think that basically every story change that has been made for the show improves upon the narrative immensely. 

This is in large part because the book's narrative has no use for women at all. And it's arguable that this is because the entire conflict is about that cultural bias: the succession battle is kicked off by one generation choosing between a female heir and a male heir, and then the next generation has to go through the same thing, only the second time around everyone fucking dies (because, as I said, it's a tragedy). Twice the rightful heir (by birth order) is denied because of her gender, and that's just how things are because men in the fake middle ages, am I right, and look sometimes I want my fiction to make me mad I guess. But what all of the women characters are lacking in the book is any MOTIVATION for why they do anything. We are told what happened but not really why, either the delay or the unreasonable action or whatever, and this isn't me wanting characters to behave rationally and being mad that people don't always do the logical thing. That's fine! That's truthful both in fiction and reality! People make bad choices or don't succeed because of the dumbest things all the time in history. I actually really like stories that acknowledge that sometimes a letter gets delayed because of the weather and it completely alters the trajectory of millions of lives, for better or for worse. 

What I don't like is a story that due to its incomplete view of characters or whatever tells me that things happen with no explanation for it at all. I'm not mad it's a tragedy; I knew what I was getting myself into. I'm just mad that honestly for the first time in my experience of reading GRRM's books, it felt like the worldview of misogyny etc. was just the explanation for everything, without the redeeming quality of getting to be in the point of view of various female characters with a diverse range of interests and abilities and failings. I don't regret reading the book because I do have a much firmer grasp on what the show is doing, and I actually enjoyed the sections that aren't about the characters in the show's narrative much much more than those sections, but boy. I finished the second season of HotD after I read the book, and it continued to diverse significantly, and I can only hope it continues to do so for however many more seasons they have to tell the whole story, because we all deserve better. 

Grade: C

Book 19: The New Guy by Sarina Bowen

Okay, look. If you're in the market for a hockey m/m romance novel to read on a porch while you're on vacation, this is perfectly serviceable. The titular new guy is both of the main characters: one is a young hockey player who keeps getting traded to new teams, the other is a newly hired athletic trainer for the team. They meet before the season at a bar before they know who they are and almost hook up! The hockey player has an overbearing dad! The athletic trainer is a young widower with a kid and an overbearing mother-in-law! 

I was sort of hoping for more from this, but the characters don't make a ton of sense and while the daughter's not the worst kind of kid character you find in a book like this, it was still more than I really wanted. Plus I kept arguing with the sports, which is never a good sign. But again, it did its job on my vacation, so I can't complain too much.

Grade: C 

Book 15: The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord

 A book club book! And one we all felt pretty ambivalent about, sadly. It’s very much what I think of as cozy sci-fi, in that while things are definitely happening (first contact on a future earth where unexplained things have happened to the cities of the world) it’s not actually that interested in suspense or peril? And sometimes that can be nice, but it can also tip over into a story with stakes that should be high but which always feel low because you’re never actually invested in the reality or in doubt of the result. There’s a kind of model UN setup where one of the aliens (surprise!) is in disguise as a teacher, and the students are being quizzed on what’s presented as a fictional scenario but which we know is real, and the entire description of the scenario made me feel like someone was explaining the backstory of their D&D campaign without actually letting me play it, or even watch other people play. I never got hooked into the characters or the world.

 

Grade: C

Book 10: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

This book has been on my radar since it was published in 2019, but I only just now decided I was in the right headspace to read a book about all of the ways that global warming will destroy the fragile equilibrium that enables humans to survive on our planet. I don't know that I actually was in the right headspace for that, frankly, but one of the other interesting elements of reading this book now is that all of the science is at least 5 years out of date. And when it comes to climate science and, more importantly to the thesis of this book, climate projections of how warm it will get by when and even more crucially, what that will have done to various systems, none of the predictions contained in this book had the presumably desired impact of shocking me out of complacency. If anything the timeframes presented in the book feel almost naïve from here, to say nothing of the chapter on the impact a warmer planet has on the likelihood of future pandemics. I don't say any of this because I'm a climate doomer, or think there's nothing that can be done, or even that we're on exactly the same bad trajectory we were five years ago. I just think this book was actually not meant for me, at this time. Also, the book was written during the middle of the Trump presidency, and the despair present from that in the writing did remind me of how that felt to live under every day, and I would really like to not return to that. 

Grade: C

Book 8: Murder on Mistletoe Lane by Clara McKenna

So, this is a sequel! Something I did not realize when I started reading it. It's a Christmas-season set murder mystery at the English manor of newlyweds in the early 20th century. This is apparently the fifth murder mystery that Stella and Lyndy have found themselves in the middle of, and because it's a sequel, the character setup is both perfunctory and spends a lot of time referencing events from previous books, and I found it more tedious than intriguing. I kept reading because I did actually want to find out the big reveals, and while they weren't disappointing exactly, they couldn't overcome the overall experience I had reading it. 

Grade: C 

Book 7: The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict

A Christmas manor house murder mystery! The twist with this one is that it's a contemporary setting, and also that it's a game within a game, essentially - the now deceased matriarch of the Armitage family has required that her whole family gather at the family estate in order to play a series of games to determine who would inherit the house. The whole setup is contrived even for this genre, and the main failing of this book is that there are twelve poems of clues to decipher and solve, but they're not actually clues the reader can hope to solve. The whole mystery development ends up feeling inert as a result. 

Grade: C

Book 4: The Christmas Veto by Keira Andrews

Sigh, another Christmas romance that's...fine, I guess? This is somehow the third fake dating storyline within the same series, where one of the guys in the fake romance is the son/stepson of the fake romance guys of the first novel. At a certain point, you'd think that people would catch on! It's inoffensive but doesn't offer a lot more than that, unfortunately. 

Grade: C

Book 3: Bring Me Home by Annabeth Albert

I keep trying gay romances by this author, because they wrote a couple of romances I read a while ago that I remember liking a lot, and then I end up disappointed. This one is about a retired naval investigator in his early 40s who meets a really hot 23 year old at a gay bar, only to discover that he's the son of one of his high school friends, oh no! And also the 23 year old is going to be living with him in his old victorian house that he inherited from his aunt, and also there's a...mystery to be solved? And it's a whole forbidden romance thing that both wants to be a massive problem and something that's easily overcome, and I don't know! It didn't really work for me, even though I like a lot of age gap romances and I'm not opposed to a fantasy narrative about restoring a house together and finding love. So far I haven't found a book this year that really hits. 

Grade: C

Book 2: The Christmas Orphans Club by Becca Freeman

Another catch up Christmas novel! This book should be right up my alley, and instead it's one that has a pretty interesting conceit that just completely falls apart. It's about two best friends from college who both don't have good family options for Christmas, so they create their own Christmas tradition. But at some point, there's a huge falling out between them, leaving their other orphan friends in a difficult situation, and the narrative shifts back and forth through time and shows various Christmases of the past so the reader can piece together what happened. However, the falling out doesn't really land, and while I'm not opposed to stories about people in their twenties making bad social decisions, the particular choices here just made me wonder why any of them are actually friends. Deeply meh. 

Grade: C 

Book 1: In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren

Yes, it is January and yes, I am still making my way through my Christmas books from 2023! This is a deeply mediocre romance novel about a woman who goes through a groundhog day of her holiday vacation with her immediate family and the family friends they've done Christmas with her entire life. But this might be the final year at the vacation home they all go to, and she hooked up with the wrong pseudo-cousin who's not actually a cousin, and of course she's stuck in a dead-end job and is afraid to tell anyone what's happening! So she gets a million chances to fix it all, and finally does. This wouldn't have been good no matter what, but it especially suffers in comparison with the Hallmark Hanukkah groundhog day movie that came out in 2023, Round and Round, which is legitimately great and shows how a time loop really should be done. 

Grade: C

Book 40: An Heiress for Christmas by Samantha SoRelle

Well, one of the best things I can say for this novella is that it was short, except that its main flaw was also its slightness. Two best friends from Oxford become master and valet when one man's father loses everything and ruins his son's prospects in the process, but then the master needs to get married by Christmas or get cut off by his father, and honestly none of it matters. Perfectly readable but with no real story, and not enough Christmas to make up for it. 

Grade: C

Book 35: Once Upon a Christmas House by A.D. Ellis

We have once again hit the time of year when I stop pretending there's any chance of me getting to Book Zero and finishing my To Be Read pile in order to read a whole bunch of Christmas-themed gay romance novels and mysteries. First up, we have a classic pretend relationship for the sake of appearing on a home improvement reality TV series, with a side of magical Christmas house nonsense. I will be honest, this is a book that is a much better idea than execution, but I also failed out of five other gay romance novels before I hit this one, so at least it was that level of good! The backstory for the emotional damage one of the protagonists has was extremely silly, and this is definitely a novel that would have been much stronger if it had just been novella-length, but I had a nice time on a December evening reading this, so I can't complain much. 

Grade: C