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chronicallybookish 's review for:
So, This Is Christmas
by Tracy Andreen
Quick Stats
Age Rating: 13+
Over All: 2 stars
Plot: 1/5
Characters: 3/5
Setting: 2/5
Writing: 2/5
Special thanks to Penguin Teen and NetGalley for an eARC of this book! All thoughts and opinions reflected in this review are my own.
So, This Is Christmas follows Finley as she returns to her hometown Christmas, Oklahoma, after a unideal first semester at a prestigious east coast boarding school. But it turns out one of her classmates has arrived in Christmas wanting the full Christmas experience that Finley had told her classmates about—only… Finley may have embellished the truth about her home town a little (or a lot), and her classmate Arthur is none too happy about it. And using Finley’s guilt about ruining his and his aunt’s holiday against her, Arthur forces Finley to give him the holiday experience she had promised.
Sounds like so much fun, right? Wrong.
It… was… so… boring. It felt like nothing happened. The pacing was so slow, and I was not a fan of Finley’s narration. As a character, I liked Finley fine, but her inner monologue and the way it was written out made me want to bang my head against a wall. The characters were all fine, actually, but they were pretty two dimensional. Finley’s previous friends (Brody and Mia) were infuriating. They had no personalities, and most of their reactions made no sense and they seemed to zing from trying too hard to be friendly to irrationally angry at Finley for basically no reason.
There were also multiple instances that made me kind of uncomfortable. A few things that felt a little like fetishizing Native American women, a throwaway sentence that was mildly ableist, and another throwaway remark that felt a bit homophobic.
Here are some quotes. Please keep in mind that these are from the ARC and not the finished copy. They’re also all very subtle, but they just didn’t sit right with me.
“…ever since his wife left him two years ago for the local male dance teacher who—surprise!—turned out to not be gay after all…” (pg. 43)
I’m sorry… what? That was just super weird. Later in the book there seemed to be positive LGBTQ+ representation (I’m not a part of the community though, so I can’t guarantee that the rep later on was positive).
“Tall and trim, and sporting movie star cheekbones inherited from the 1/16th Cherokee side of her genetic tree…” (pg. 43)
“I may have a smidgen of Cherokee in my DNA thanks to Grandma Joe’s side of the genetic tree, but mom’s Nordic/Irish ancestors won out in the most overt ways.” (pg. 69)
There are more mentions of her grandma’s beauty and relating it to the 1/16th Cherokee ancestry. These were just the first two, so I took specific note. Again, I’m not Native, so I guess I don’t know that that’s offensive, but I know that Native women are often fetishized, and something about the way it was written made me uncomfortable. Like, why was it necessary to repeatedly mention that this white woman was 1/16th Cherokee?
“[Arthur was] suddenly hit by an case of tourist ADD. He touched every Christmas, OK-stamped souvenir and knickknack on the tables between the door and our destination.” (pg. 54)
I thought we learned our lesson about trivializing mental illnesses and disabilities that can be debilitating with the “I’m so OCD” and Target’s “OCD: Obsessive Christmas Disorder” sweaters back in like 2017. Also the correct term is ADHD. ADD was removed from the DSM-5 a few years back. ADD is already a disability that is often trivialized as “distractability” and “hyperactivity”. It’s so much more than that, and we don’t need to add to this mentality and make it harder for people who struggle with ADHD to get the accommodations they need.
There were also many instances of what felt like fatphobia, where Finley said her dad was more attractive than the other dads because he was thin and they weren’t. This came up several times, but I only made note of one that felt pretty blatant:
“He’s not fat, and that puts him ahead of most of my friends’ dads in the looks department.” (pg. 114)
So, this is a disappointment. I love holiday romcom books, but this one was not worth it. Even if you ignore the subtle issues, the book itself was just incredibly boring.
Age Rating: 13+
Over All: 2 stars
Plot: 1/5
Characters: 3/5
Setting: 2/5
Writing: 2/5
Special thanks to Penguin Teen and NetGalley for an eARC of this book! All thoughts and opinions reflected in this review are my own.
So, This Is Christmas follows Finley as she returns to her hometown Christmas, Oklahoma, after a unideal first semester at a prestigious east coast boarding school. But it turns out one of her classmates has arrived in Christmas wanting the full Christmas experience that Finley had told her classmates about—only… Finley may have embellished the truth about her home town a little (or a lot), and her classmate Arthur is none too happy about it. And using Finley’s guilt about ruining his and his aunt’s holiday against her, Arthur forces Finley to give him the holiday experience she had promised.
Sounds like so much fun, right? Wrong.
It… was… so… boring. It felt like nothing happened. The pacing was so slow, and I was not a fan of Finley’s narration. As a character, I liked Finley fine, but her inner monologue and the way it was written out made me want to bang my head against a wall. The characters were all fine, actually, but they were pretty two dimensional. Finley’s previous friends (Brody and Mia) were infuriating. They had no personalities, and most of their reactions made no sense and they seemed to zing from trying too hard to be friendly to irrationally angry at Finley for basically no reason.
There were also multiple instances that made me kind of uncomfortable. A few things that felt a little like fetishizing Native American women, a throwaway sentence that was mildly ableist, and another throwaway remark that felt a bit homophobic.
Here are some quotes. Please keep in mind that these are from the ARC and not the finished copy. They’re also all very subtle, but they just didn’t sit right with me.
“…ever since his wife left him two years ago for the local male dance teacher who—surprise!—turned out to not be gay after all…” (pg. 43)
I’m sorry… what? That was just super weird. Later in the book there seemed to be positive LGBTQ+ representation (I’m not a part of the community though, so I can’t guarantee that the rep later on was positive).
“Tall and trim, and sporting movie star cheekbones inherited from the 1/16th Cherokee side of her genetic tree…” (pg. 43)
“I may have a smidgen of Cherokee in my DNA thanks to Grandma Joe’s side of the genetic tree, but mom’s Nordic/Irish ancestors won out in the most overt ways.” (pg. 69)
There are more mentions of her grandma’s beauty and relating it to the 1/16th Cherokee ancestry. These were just the first two, so I took specific note. Again, I’m not Native, so I guess I don’t know that that’s offensive, but I know that Native women are often fetishized, and something about the way it was written made me uncomfortable. Like, why was it necessary to repeatedly mention that this white woman was 1/16th Cherokee?
“[Arthur was] suddenly hit by an case of tourist ADD. He touched every Christmas, OK-stamped souvenir and knickknack on the tables between the door and our destination.” (pg. 54)
I thought we learned our lesson about trivializing mental illnesses and disabilities that can be debilitating with the “I’m so OCD” and Target’s “OCD: Obsessive Christmas Disorder” sweaters back in like 2017. Also the correct term is ADHD. ADD was removed from the DSM-5 a few years back. ADD is already a disability that is often trivialized as “distractability” and “hyperactivity”. It’s so much more than that, and we don’t need to add to this mentality and make it harder for people who struggle with ADHD to get the accommodations they need.
There were also many instances of what felt like fatphobia, where Finley said her dad was more attractive than the other dads because he was thin and they weren’t. This came up several times, but I only made note of one that felt pretty blatant:
“He’s not fat, and that puts him ahead of most of my friends’ dads in the looks department.” (pg. 114)
So, this is a disappointment. I love holiday romcom books, but this one was not worth it. Even if you ignore the subtle issues, the book itself was just incredibly boring.