It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas

Novella Review: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
Julianna Keyes, 2024

New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review. 

I've been reviewing a bunch of retellings this year, and this very nearly qualifies. It starts with a writer on a Christmas Train, after all. 

Only in reality, it's more a funny subversion of Hallmark tropes with a happily-ever-after. 

Eve and Will are travel writers, and their boss somehow sent them both to cover Christmas in this special holiday resort town. Whoever writes the best article gets a pending promotion. (This is a set-up that makes no sense. Not because of the promotion, but because you wouldn't write about a special (probably prohibitively expensive) Christmas experience in a travel magazine AFTER the holiday.)

The problem is that both Eve and Will are Christmas cynics, but their boss isn't at all. They know she's going to want the schmaltzy, feel-good story, and they both struggle to write it. 

Complicating matters, through the sheer perversity of the universe both Eve and Will have former love interests who live and work in Noelville. So either Eve or Will would be the star of a more traditional plot - fall in love, embrace the magic of Christmas, etc.

Except that any little embers sparked by those former flames are immediately quenched by their bizarre, unyielding cheer and enthusiasm for all things Christmas. Eve and Will start spending time together just to get away from the others. We find out that Eve's family moved around a lot, so she never had traditional holidays, while Will's went all out, but only for appearances and no heart.

Of course by the end they get together (and their boss is extremely smug), and they also discover that the important holiday magic was just being together. Not in Noelville. 

I thought the story was fine. The banter was funny; the romantic writing effective. The thing that upgrades this from fine to pretty enjoyable for me was the fact that it can be read as a gentle subversion of some of the standard rom-com tropes. Both big city writers realize that they are better with each other, living their career-focused, big city lives where they both understand the pace, than trying to change for the quintessential small-town guy or gal.