my rating: ★★★★.25
aesthetic: 🤶🏻🎄🍪☕️🧺🌨️🧣⛪️🎁🪵
This was one of my first ever Christmas romcoms and it did not disappoint. It was a quick read and fun with the perfect cozy vibes and festive season feels.
I loved the dynamic of the friendship between Beatrice and Emilia. Beatrice was the friend that didn’t love but also didn’t hate Christmas, her holiday experiences were limited to what each foster family had to offer while she was growing up. Emilia on the other hand was a full ‘Cindy-Lou who’ character, she adored everything there was to offer when it came to Christmas, the decorating, the food, the full spirit of Christmas festivities, but I loved that she also accepted her friends lack of holiday cheer. So when Em won a trip to ‘Christmasland’, a small town in Vermont decked out to the nines for Christmas, Em saw it as her chance at her very own hallmark movie experience while Bea saw it as a vacation away from New York.
The way the author structured the whole story to feel so realistic, that when anything out of the ordinary happened Em pointed out it was the ‘hallmark experience’ (much to Bea’s disagreement). The whole atmosphere of the book was so refreshing, it really set the tone for the holiday season, like a cup of hot chocolate on a winter day, and decorating the Christmas tree at the beginning of December. Anne-Marie Meyer really captured the essence of Christmas and it leaves you feeling the comfort and excitement for the holidays.
The romance was so fun. Ethan was the grumpy ‘grinch-like’ character in this story despite his mum owning ‘the north pole’ bed and breakfast in the middle of ‘christmasland’. The romance between Bae and Ethan was gradual, she wanted to put on a face for Em and he wanted to give Bea the quintessential Christmas experience that she never got as a child, while both characters had sworn off relationships neither one could deny the chemistry they felt for one another. They could connect over their disinterest in Christmas while still appreciating the little things Christmas had to offer. I only wish they communicated their desire in one another sooner because both refused to believe the other was interested in anything other than a friendship or that it was purely fake.
In the end this book was the perfect start to the festive season, cozy in all the right ways, and leaves the reader feeling smitten and giddy. For a book under 200 pages it never felt rushed or lacked detail and the character development and world building was like a breath of fresh air.
I’d like to thank Anne-Marie Meyer for sending me an advanced e-book copy of her Christmas romance 🫶🏼