The Nightmare Before Kissmas

I listened to the audio book for this one, and I highly recommend it. Ellis Evans did a really great job bouncing between goofy fun conversations and serious moments. I gave it an extra star because of it. I laughed out loud in my car many times.

This has been toted as being a enemies-to-lovers romance, and that's absolutely not it at all. They are "entered" into a competition to prove that they should be the one that will marry Iris (all 3 involved characters have no interest in this marriage), but they're going along while trying to figure out what the driving factor is between this push for an arraigned marriage. There's a lot more political drama through this book, so just be prepared for that. This is another moment where I'm glad that I don't read the blurbs before I read.

This is my first holiday-themed book, so I'm not sure if it's quite my jam yet. But the characters were adorable, and there was a lot of communication between all, not just the MCs. It also didn't feel like there was a lot of random fluff thrown in, and the steamy scenes weren't just thrown into random spaces for entertainment purposes. The steam was a little diluted with a lot of talking (consent, consent, consent) and Coal's insecurities were a constant point of discussion between the two.

I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if we got to see a little from Hex's POV. This was straight from Coal's perspective only. Even just an epilogue with a peek through Hex's eyes would have been fine. It just emphasized the feeling that he's more of a background character. I wanted to see more of him.

I'll be picking up the next in this series to follow with Kris' story.

SPOILERY Interesting take by having Santa be the holiday mafia boss with capitalistic greed.

Holidays apparently have royal families so obviously when the Prince of Christmas gets thrust into an arranged marriage with the Princess of Easter by his asshole dad, Santa, he’ll instead fall for the Prince of Halloween and stage an anti-capitalist coup against the commodification of Christmas. 
So, I’m back reading queer Christmas romcoms again and this one is a mixed bag I feel. It’s funny and cute but the characters didn’t quite work for me, that might be a lack of tension between the love interests. The world of holiday royals, politicking and paparazzi was different but maybe distractingly crazy if you’re not invested in the chaotic cheese.
Lastly, the broad message about the dominance of Christmas and how it becomes about cheap plastic gifts was good for the large part. But it got a bit focused on telling us how it should be rather than actually living up to it.
So on the whole, a cute romp with some fun themes but I felt like it needed a lot more polish behind its structure and messaging.  

Random quote: “I do not BLAST ICE when I orgasm!”