Thank you to Wise Wolf Books and NetGalley for providing me with free electronic ARCs of this series in exchange for fair and honest reviews.
This series of four companion novels by Chelsea Bobulski are all set in Christmas, Virginia. They are YA contemporary romances. They can be read in any order; I read the third one first, though I would probably recommend reading them in publication order, as protagonists from previous books make brief appearances in later books that are more meaningful if you’ve already read their story.
All I Want for Christmas is the Boy I Can’t Have
I absolutely adored this book. While technically the third in the series, I read it first.
It follows Isla, a teenage girl in her senior year of high school who runs a wedding planning business with her mother, and August, the son of the bride in one of the weddings that they’re planning. Isla instantly falls for him, but he has a girlfriend. The romance was adorable; I shipped the pair a lot, and was genuinely invested in their getting together. It felt like a rom-com (which is fitting, because rom-coms are mentioned quite a bit, and Isla and August bond over them).
I also absolutely loved the setting, where most of the action takes place around events related to planning August’s sister’s wedding, which was adorable. The plot was relatively simple and predictable, but still completely enjoyable. My only critique would be that, considering that the book takes place over only six weeks, Isla and August do get very dramatic with their feelings very quickly; it definitely wasn’t enough to make me change the rating, but it was one thing that bothered me a little bit. However, I still thoroughly enjoyed the book and give it an enthusiastic five star rating.
This book came out today, and I definitely recommend picking it up if any aspect of it sounds appealing.
Publication date: December 1, 2021
All I Want for Christmas is the Girl Next Door
I read this book after loving All I Want for Christmas Is the Boy I Can’t Have, another book in this series, so I had high hopes going into it, which were immediately disappointed.
A large part of the issue that I have with this book was the sheer disdain that I have for Graham, the protagonist. After having been in love with his best friend, Sarah, for two years while she’s been dating his other friend, Jeremy, he makes a wish to be the one dating her instead, which then comes true when he wakes up the next morning. It is never really clear why he’s so obsessed with Sarah; they have no chemistry, but he keeps insisting that she should be with him rather than her boyfriend. In the new reality, he is now dating her, but emotionally cheating on her with Piper, the new girl in town and his co-worker at the bookstore, literally the entire time. He and Piper were sort of cute together, with the exception of the cheating thing and the fact that he over-sexualized her constantly. Honestly, I think the cheating aspect was what ruined this book for me the most; it was also an element in the first book I’d read in this series, but circumstantially the characters seemed much less worthy of condemnation in that case.
I do like the bookstore setting element, though it isn’t featured much. I also genuinely love Piper’s character independently of her relationship with Graham, and I like Sarah as well; they definitely feel like the two most sympathetic characters in the book. I enjoyed the alternate reality aspect of it more than I was expecting, but found the way the author dealt with relative characters’ awarenesses of it confusing; it seems like many of the characters are somewhat aware that something is off from how it should be, but that doesn’t feel like it was addressed enough either. I also found the resolution very unsatisfying, though I can’t really elaborate on why that is without spoilers. Additionally, the magic/alternate reality element feels very inconsistent with the rest of the series, though you wouldn’t notice as much if you read it first, where it falls in chronological order.
However, despite my issues with it, I did still enjoy reading the book; it was quick and light, and I did feel somewhat invested in it, so I’m giving it 3 stars.
Publication date: October 28, 2021
All I Want for Christmas is the Girl in Charge
This book is a very loose enemies-to-lovers (it’s really more mild-dislike-to-lovers) story following Evelyn, a. very driven girl who is staging a self-written stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice featuring her as Elizabeth Bennet, and Bennett, the “bad boy” who is living with his aunt and uncle due to his mother’s drug problems and his step-father’s abuse, and is mostly just trying to get to age 18 and fulfill his court-mandated community service hours. He ends up being cast as Mr. Darcy due to a lack of other options and with the assurance that rehearsals will count towards his hours, and thus this adorable romance starts.
I absolutely adore Pride and Prejudice (it’s one of my favorite books of all time), so I already knew I was going to love this book. The setting, revolving around rehearsing a play where the two protagonists are playing love interests and gradually realizing their feelings for each other as they do so, is a favorite rarely-used trope of mine. The characters were both very lovable; I related a lot to Evelyn (the intense scheduling, the Pride and Prejudice obsession), so I obviously enjoyed reading about her. However, I also ended up loving Beckett much more than I was expecting to, since the bad boy/troubled new boy/etc. archetype doesn’t usually do much for me, though those elements did play much less of a role than I was expecting them to, and he really is just misunderstood. There was tons of chemistry between the pair throughout the book, so the romance felt much more satisfying because of that. I also enjoyed the little Pride and Prejudice parallels that Bobulski utilized in their relationship. My one criticism (which is also an issue I have with the other books in the series) is that the romance definitely felt like it got too serious too early, especially since they’d only really known each other for a few weeks.
I also really enjoyed the side characters and plot. Getting to see the characters from All I Want for Christmas Is the Girl Next Door and All I Want for Christmas Is the Boy I Can’t Have was fun, and Aunt Bee and Uncle Bill’s subplot was also really cute, and I was almost as invested in that storyline as in the main romance.
Overall, I absolutely loved this book, and give it an enthusiastic five stars. I would recommend it to anybody who loves Pride and Prejudice, very mild enemies-to-lovers, or is just looking for a fluffy contemporary YA holiday romance to read.
Publication date: November 10, 2021
All I Want for Christmas is the Girl Who Can’t Love
All I Want for Christmas is the Girl Who Can’t Love follows Savannah Mason, a girl who has forced herself not to believe in love due to a rumored curse preventing women in her family from being happy in love; although she herself doesn’t think the curse is real, she’s decided that she has no interest in romance after seeing it hurt her mother over and over again. Instead, she’s focused on succeeding in her freshman year of college despite her dyslexia and then achieving her dream career traveling the world. Meanwhile, she becomes friends with Jordan Merrick, a junior at the school who likewise isn’t currently looking for romance due to a bad breakup a few years prior, as they work together on an archaeological dig that Jordan is leading to attempt to figure out the ending to a love story from the Revolutionary War that he found letters from. As the two grow closer, Savannah is forced to reconsider all of her long-set convictions about love and romance.
I absolutely love Savannah. She’s very set in her plan in life and refuses to let anything throw her off track. Some of the most interesting aspects of her character were her relationship with her mother and her relationship with her dyslexia. Savannah’s relationship with her mother had long been strained by the effects of her mother’s many failed romances on her mental health, which then affected the way that she treated her father, and the way that that connection evolve over the course of the book was very well done. Similarly, I really enjoyed reading about Savannah’s attitude towards her dyslexia; she starts off the book seeing it as something shameful and that she wants to figure out on her own and hide from people, but gradually learns that getting support from others is important and allows her to succeed more than trying to handle everything on her own. Her attitude towards love was also fascinating to read about, and was definitely the main focus of the book. All of her character development was paced very well.
On the other hand, I didn’t really care about Jordan much. He definitely had quite a bit of “nice guy” syndrome, and talks a lot about how girls won’t like him because he’s too kind and considerate, which just isn’t a good look on him. Ignoring those aspects, he is at least appealing as a love interest for Savannah; I’m just not sure that the story needed to be told partially from his perspective. Since Savannah’s character and story arc are so well-written, Jordan’s chapters really can’t help but fade in comparison.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the plotline about the pair trying to figure out what happened to the pair of lovers from the Revolutionary War; Jordan had found some letters written between them previously, which had prompted him to start working at this archaeological dig site, and the story is gradually unveiled over the course of the book, which I was almost as invested in as the main plot.
I will say that this definitely does not read as a Christmas story; the bulk of it takes place between September and November, so, even though the ending takes place at Christmas, you definitely shouldn’t expect that aspect of it to be a huge aspect of the book. I think the only thing that bothered me was how heteronormative the book was. While also present in the other books in this series, the general tone of it seemed to be that love exists purely between a man and a woman, which, as a bisexual reader, did not sit well with me. This book is also much more overtly Christian than other books in the series, likely because Jordan is the son of a pastor, so it infiltrates the way he talks most of the time. While it didn’t bother me in the rest of the books, in this one it was prevalent enough that I’m removing a star from what would have been a five-star read.
Publication date: December 22, 2021
Overall, I thoroughly recommend this series if you’re looking for light, contemporary YA romances!
Although All I Want for Christmas Is the Girl Next Door wasn’t my favorite, and is definitely the weakest book of the series, I did still enjoy it, and the other books are all wonderful. If you’re looking for too much character development or complex plots, you probably won’t find them here, but the characters are almost all lovable, the romances are adorable, and the Christmas setting is perfect for this time of year. The only caveats I have are that Christmas is a huge theme part of the setting, so if you don’t want to read four books about that for any reason then I probably wouldn’t recommend them to you, and that they have virtually no diversity; everybody (to the best of my recollection) is white and straight, and there’s a lot of very heteronormative language, which bothered me as a queer person (though it wasn’t to the extent that I found it detracted from my opinions of the books as a whole, except in the case of All I Want for Christmas is the Girl Who Can’t Love). Due to the simplicity of the plots, one could argue either that there aren’t enough characters to expect that representation, or that the small-town Virginia setting might prevent that sort of diversity from being obvious, but those aren’t reasonable excuses in 2021. Again, I do still recommend the books, but I feel that those aspects are important to point out.
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