Title: In a Holidaze
Author: Christina Lauren
Series: n/a
A charming holiday romance
I would like to thank Christina Lauren, Gallery Books, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.
I’m a little surprised I like this book, to be honest; CL’s books tend to be hit or miss with me. I didn’t read the blurb beforehand, went in blind, and when I realized it was going to have a Groundhog Day plot, I groaned inwardly, because it’s been overdone at this point. I thought I knew exactly what would happen—she was going to redo the day until she realized her crush on Andrew was a holdover from childhood and that she’d really been in love with Theo for years, or something along those lines.
No, no. This did not go as expected, and CL gets props for that. I’m glad it proved unpredictable, yet I’m upset about it because I wasted so much of the novel waiting for the other shoe to drop and not allowing myself to like Andrew because I didn’t think he was the endgame, lol! As I got closer and closer to the end, I was prepared to writing a scathing review about how stupid it was to waste that much time on Andrew the Red Herring and not spend any time with the hero, Theo, who was portrayed as pretty much a womanizing jackass. That would have been horrible writing—so thank goodness I had it wrong.
So my feelings toward Andrew are a bit tainted by my expecting to dislike him, but in the end I did like him; he was charming and endearing, and I was happy for him and Maelyn. Maelyn was a great if unremarkable heroine. It might have benefited her arc if we’d had more of a demonstration of the problem that she needed to fix, her fear of change and rejection, because her climactic revelation barely registered. There was some setup, but it felt like we jumped into the Groundhogging pretty quick and was distracted by that for much of the time.
Overall, this was a lovely story whose biggest problem was focusing a bit too much on the romance rather than Maelyn’s women’s fiction arc. I wish I hadn’t let myself develop a prejudice against Andrew at the beginning, but I liked him well enough in the end.
