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 2: The Jolliest Bunch by Danny Pellegrino

I picked up this collection of essays about the holidays after watching and enjoying a Hallmark Christmas movie that the author had also written. It is a fun, light read of stories about a variety of aspects of holiday remembrances: our experiences as children vs. adults, the sometimes bizarre people who get thrown into our lives around Christmas, how important the Scholastic book fair was to many of us who were born in the '70s and '80s, and the way end of year celebrations often make us melancholy and think of people who are no longer in our lives for many reasons. A well-timed read for right after the season has ended. 

Grade: B

Book 1: Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson

We're still within the Twelve Days of Christmas, so I'm still reading Christmas books and watching Christmas movies! This one is a festive mystery novella in a series I haven't read any of the other books in, but I've heard very good things about the main books, and based on my experience with this, I'm not surprised!

This is a very meta mystery series, with a detective/protagonist who knows that he's playing that role in his 'real life' and so comments on elements of it within the story. In this case he discusses the specific aspects of a Christmas special, where the mystery is lighter and the story as a whole doesn't include every reoccurring character and plot element that you would expect from the main story. It's a festive story in which five days before Christmas, his ex-wife's current partner is murdered, and she's the main suspect, so he travels to help her clear her name. It's also about a magician and stagecraft hijinks and also includes commentary on how celebrity charity works, with a satisfying ending that I in no way predicted but that did all come together when he laid it out, and I could see how I could have put it all together if I was that kind of mystery reader. A very pleasant way to spend New Year's Day! 

Grade: A

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 6: Hercule Poirot's Silent Night by Sophie Hannah

A classic kind of Poirot mystery, this time for Christmas! He and his trusty friend Catchpool are convinced by Catchpool's fairly unpleasant mother to come to a crumbling manor by the sea a few days before Christmas to help the family solve a murder to prevent a murder. Of course there are many secrets and revelations and red herrings along the way. I would have preferred slightly more Christmas in this story, but it's twisty in the Christie style, and I enjoyed reading it. 

Grade: B

Book 5: Catered All the Way by Annabeth Albert

I liked this one better than the other romance I read by this author this month! I can't say that I completely recommend it, but this is a pretty charming romance between a twenty-something gamer and his older brother's high school best friend who he's always had a crush on. The crush comes back home and helps out the siblings with their family business over the holidays (a subplot I truly could have done without), and sparks fly, etc. It was fine!

Grade: B

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 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 41: Murder on the Christmas Express by Alexandra Benedict

My final Christmas mystery of 2023! This one was pretty entertaining - it's an obvious riff on Murder on the Orient Express, only it's a Christmas Eve train to Scotland that's been delayed. Our main protagonist is a retired police detective who's traveling to the Highlands to see her daughter; their relationship has always been fraught and distant, and now her daughter is having a very difficult delivery of her first baby and so time is of the essence! Without wanting to spoil too much of this book, I will say that there's a lot more sexual assault trauma than I was really looking for in my Christmas murder mystery. It ended up feeling pretty dark in a way I wasn't expecting. Still, with that caveat, it was a good read. 

Grade: B

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 37: The Christmas Guest by Peter Swanson

Another Christmas mystery novella! This one is about a woman living in New York in 2019, who always spends Christmas alone, and rereads an old journal that tells the tale of a Christmas in the Cotswolds in 1989 that involved an old country manor house and murder. Halfway through the story, it takes a twist and we discover the real truth, etc. 

I liked this story a lot, but it felt a bit unbalanced--I think it would have been better if rather than the two parts being about equal in length, the first part was longer. I felt like the latter half suffered from being overexplored, and lessened the impact of the Christmas haunting themes of the story. But it was another one that I enjoyed overall, and I'd definitely read another story by this author. 

Grade: B

Book 36: The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett

Next up on the Christmas-themed stories, the first mystery of the month! Apparently this is a sequel novella to a very popular full length mystery called The Appeal that focuses on the same amateur theater group in a small English village. This explains why it felt like there were a bunch of references to characters or previous events that never got resolved, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit! It's an epistolary style, with lots of emails and text messages and ads in church programs, and it felt like a Christmas special on a cozy mystery show that would air on Acorn. The mystery and resolution wasn't particularly shocking, but then it fits with the holiday season that way. 

Grade: B 

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  

Book 16: Masters in This Hall by KJ Charles

Well, it took me until February 7, but I finally read a great Christmas romance novel this season! 

Honestly, I expected this to be great; it's a novella set in a universe I had enjoyed, and the setting is also delightful. John Garland has been dismissed from his job as a hotel detective after a robbery occurred while he was, uh, distracted by Barnaby Littimer. He retreats to his rich uncle's home on Christmas Eve for the Christmas season, and discovers that Littimer is there as a master of festivities during the the week leading up to his cousin's wedding. He is of course immediately suspicious that Littimer is there to rob his uncle, but is there more to the story? Who can say! 

The pairing is very fun, and so are the holiday traditions Littimer is in charge of leading, including a mummers play. It's a classic mystery set at a great house over the holidays, and I had a great time reading it. 

Grade: A 

Book 15: Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night by Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma

Well, it's the start of February and I finally read the winter Solstice book I bought in December! Not bad. 

This is a queer, poly, multi-faith book about magic and love and family. It starts with Layla hearing that her boyfriend Meraud is missing from Nat, who is Meraud's other partner. Meraud is a wizard who has practiced a risky kind of magic, and is now stuck and hidden in an in between state, neither alive nor dead. The only way to find him and bring him back is for Layla and Nat, as his beloveds, to work together and follow the breadcrumbs to him. 

It's essentially an enemies-to-family story, where the relationship we see develop and deepen is between these two people who have nothing in common other than Meraud. At times Meraud feels more like a mcguffin than a character, but what Layla and Nat (and the other people in their separate lives) go through in order to bring him back is compelling enough that I didn't mind, in the end. A lovely, quick story to read with a mug of tea. 

Grade: B