Synopsis:

What happens when there’s no room at the inn and you and your potentially demonic cat become roommates with your grumpy one-night stand?

Part-time adult film actress/one-time adult film director/makeup artist Sunny Palmer has accidentally sold her very first screenplay to the Hope Channel. That was six months ago. Fast forward to a looming deadline, an uninspired Sunny has returned to the source of her inspiration in Christmas Notch, Vermont, to immerse herself in the local Christmas miracle on which her fever dream of a movie pitch was based.

Isaac Kelly, former boy band heartthrob and the saddest boy in the music biz, is the latest owner of the town’s historic mansion. After his years of heartbreak following his young wife’s death, Isaac’s record label is done waiting for new music. What better place to attempt his first holiday album than a snow-covered mansion where he can become a hermit in peace?

But after their best friends’ wedding leads to them waking up together in a freezing motel room with questionable wiring and a broken shower, Isaac takes a chance and asks Sunny to stay with him at his home. Surely the place is big enough that he’ll hardly see her or her unhinged cat. But when the two discover they’re both creatively blocked, they make a handshake deal: Isaac will help Sunny hunt down the truth behind the local lore, and Sunny will find Isaac a new muse.

And with these two opposites under one roof, there’s no way this jingle bell mingle could go off script…right?

Rating:

Review:

Full disclosure but I stopped reading this one back 30% of the way through. I think it just wasn’t my jam. I’m not sure if it was anything to do with the book itself or it wasn’t my style. I also didn’t realize this was the third book in a series, so maybe that would have made the prologue make more sense. We started the book at a wedding with a bunch of people that I didn’t know, a lot of whom seem to be porn stars. But this wedding is the vehicle that brings our main love interest together.

I loved the book’s message of sex positivity, body positivity and acceptance, embracing of the whole spectrum of human relationships. That was great.

Overall there were just too many characters. In the brief portion that I read, I was introduced to at least 15 people and most of them are people that were given no introduction. Even if I had read the other books in the series, a brief refresher would have been a good step to make.

I also think this book is being marketed wrong. Looking at the cover, I expected a pretty typical holiday romance, a cute plot in a Christmasy town and some spice along the way. But then I opened the book to someone shouting “Hey, what’s up tampon string?” Um, ok then. Definitely not the vibe I expected. Perhaps I would have liked it more if it had been marketed at the right audience.

The biggest thing that turned me off this book were the sex scenes. Just not my thing. Honestly, it made me think “Ew, that’s kinda gross.” I am sure there are people out there who will love it, but it just isn’t me. The spicy bits were not my jam. And then I realized that I should stop reading. I didn’t like the way the sex scenes were written, I was confused about characters, and the two main characters hadn’t garnered my interest at all. It was not the book for me.