Aaaaaahhhh. Oh my gosh, I loved this. This was almost every kink of mine (and a few I don’t have but still worked) wrapped up in a bow. I don’t generally love plots with lying, and Leo is stupid about it, but it’s handled well. This was the end of my Christmas reading (I swear!) and lovely to both end that and start 2025 on a high note. Sooo sexy and fun and even the instalove elements played well. Plus I adore a polyromance where the guys realize their friendship is something more— here, besties Leo & Jace have been banging for a while, but have stayed out of relationship territory. Until Riley comes along. Ugh, where’s my pair of dudes who need me to solidify their relationship? Excuse me while I go troll the airport. 😝

This was stunning. A really beautiful story of friends to lovers steeped in a Civil Rights Movement background. My true only quibble is that it was too short and Sofie’s guilt over her mom’s death seemed unresolved.

Also this was recommended as a Chanukah read (somewhere?), but it only happens briefly in the epilogue… which got a bit schmaltzy (pun unintended) in other ways. The bonus epilogue was brutal, but I liked seeing their imperfect happy ending.

3 stars based on the average rating of the stories within.

Only read the first two books in the series so I only read the relevant stories here. Will probably finish eventually.

Not very Christmasy for all of the title, but really this was perfect for reading post-holiday when your Christmas kinda sucked. This was fun, if a bit dramatic in parts and definitely check the CWs. I’m not sure I entirely bought the timeline/procession of their relationship— the switch from her hating him/disbelieving his motives to happily hooking up was a little sudden/underexplored. But otherwise they were very sweet & sexy and I believed the chemistry. Was it super weird when she decided to bang him BECAUSE he revealed that her dead grandma gave him her recipes? It sure was! But I quibble. And the jealousy thing isn’t usually my jam, but it worked here cause it went both ways and she was into it. Debating on whether I’ll read the next one in the series though. Her brother spends a lot of time calling his FMC “Miss Miller” which is super not my kink (and I can’t figure out if it IS a kink or not?), and they sort of already had their third-act breakup in this book, so meh? We’ll see.

What an absolutely lovely short novel this was! I loved reading something so refreshingly different in historical romance, and I loved Marion and Harry!

Ohhh, I loved this one. This is the epitome of a second-chance romance, they fucked it up when they were young and stupid and they needed the time to mature— him particularly, especially when it came to their relationship, although she did make one big bad decision. But he gives good grovel and I loved seeing his realizations over the course of the story. The “twist” was pretty obvious from the start, but it didn’t make it any less satisfying. I loved the turnaround on age-gap romances also— Jack has been set up with a much younger woman and it makes him uncomfortable.

Balogh magically knows how to handle a large cast of characters, and although I didn’t like The First Snowdrop nearly as much as this, reading it first made this a lovely return to the Stewart-Frazer family, and a few years means marriages and kids, and it worked seeing all of them mature as well. (Freddie is still my favorite.)

This one was… frustrating. The MCs went on one date previously where he was awkward as hell, then he gave her a tree and ghosted her. But when he shows up to fix the library roof, he’s all Scottish I Love You about everything. And when they get “snowed in” together (I can’t even think of this as a spoiler, everything was so obvious), he acts like she rejected him and she goes along with it completely, saying she was dismissive. And this is before any meaning is given to the tree gift.

Too many Previous/Future Main Characters in the works, especially in something so short. Also they

went hard to get these two “snowed in” together, but BREAKING THE LIBRARY ROOF? Isn’t that incredibly dangerous, if nothing else?

And I just wasn’t invested in the MCs at all.