Synopsis: A bad Santa is turning believers faster than melting snow. Can the mystery be solved in time for Christmas?
I’ve dreamed of this day for years, and now it’s reality. I’ve been called up for the Big Show. Official Pole phone and email, Naughty-or-Nice login, and upgraded I.D. with my new job title—Comet. In three weeks, I’ll be part of the team flying Santa around the world.
In an instant my life goes from peaceful, if boring, to a blizzard of last-minute flight preparations, route planning, and anxiety-triggering stress.
The moment I meet my P.A., Jillian, her beautiful smile and sparkling blue eyes are an oasis of calm. But I’ve barely got enough time to wonder if her plump lips taste as sugarplum sweet as they look. Disturbing news has popped up on Santa’s radar.
Someone is turning Santa’s most fervent believers into non-believers overnight. If we can’t find and stop this hacker, there won’t be enough reindeer cutout cookies and hot chocolate in the world to restore balance to Santa’s Naughty-or-Nice list in time for Christmas Eve.
Note to reader: What sweet Christmas romance would be complete without reindeer, The Nutcracker, ice skating at Rockefeller Center, and New York pizza?
Publication date: 20th October 2020
Publisher: Independently published
"You're never too old to believe."
Claudia is a wannabe Santa Claus's reindeer, her dream is to be part of his team, and the opportunity arrives when she's offered to supplement Comet's place, then she becomes the new Comet. She's presented to the whole team and instructed to know how everything works to make sure the Big Show is perfectly curated and executed. But a threat appears around the world, turning believers to non-believers, and Comet and the rest of the team will have to fix it before the Big Show, risking revealing the truth to the world.
My first thought right after starting the book was that Claudia's adventure starts too suddenly, you don't even get a sneak of what would be a normal day in her life in the North Pole that she's joining Santa's troops. I missed a little introduction of her, who she is, what she likes, her whereabouts during a regular day, etc. And maybe a depiction of how the North Pole in this new fantastic world. But then I liked how Delilah Night writes Claudia's first experiences, how she lived, discovered and absorbed all those new things for the first time. The writing in those parts was great, I could really feel how amused and excited Claudia was for going through all that.
And talking about the writing, it saddened me that sometimes it wasn't as descriptive as I wished it was. It was a bit simple sometimes and the character's reactions were somehow childish at times, which for the main character could be attributed to the fact that she's leaving her home for the first time in her whole life, that she's is living new experiences and has to deal with people she doesn't know much about. But even so, I felt something was missing in the writing style. Just like the romance, it felt weak, too spontaneous and fast, a bit expected and somehow superficial.
"Gifts aren't meant to be an obligation."
What I liked the least was that cliffhanger at the end of the book. The villain is introduced by the second half of the book, but the mystery is not resolved, you don't even know their real name. And I personally dislike these type of cliffhangers where you will have to read the upcoming books to find who's the villain of the story, or to know how the main character will develop, because it makes the first book look like just an introduction for the rest of the books.
But what I liked the most was that Claudia is realistic, she has anxiety and suffers from panic attacks, that makes her human –though she's actually a human-morphing reindeer– and we don't get enough characters with such real problems and illnesses, we need more representation(!!!). And I also liked that this book does talk about deeper issues than apparently it may seem –it touches topics such as feminism and feminine empowerment, equality, and how the rules at the workplace make all of us lose our own personality at work, materializing it with the elves' uniforms in the North Pole. That was quite a subject to think about.
You should read this book if you're looking for a light Christmas read, to get into the holiday spirit and to enjoy a beautiful f/f romance.
Thanks to Delilah Night for sending me an ARC of her book in exchange for an honest review.
Genre: urban fantasy, romance, f/f, LGBT+, holidays.
Content warnings: anxiety, panic attacks.
About the author: Delilah Night is a native Bostonian (Go Sox!) transplanted to California by way of seven years in Singapore. She grew up telling stories, including her third-grade magnum opus, The Last Unicorn (no, not that Last Unicorn). In high school, Delilah got very into fanfic, especially stories set in the world of Valdemar–who doesn't want her own talking horse? And in college, a former partner introduced her to erotic fanfiction–at which point Delilah put her Senior Honors Thesis aside to write some extremely dirty Star Trek: The Next Generation erotic fanfic.
In 2011, not long after the birth of her second child, Delilah wrote and had her first short story accepted for publication. Since then, she's been in a dozen anthologies from purely fantasy–Intrepid Horizons, Myths Monsters Mutations to the erotic–If Mom's Happy, Coming Together: Among the Stars. In 2014, she travelled to Cambodia, and that trip provided the background for her first novella, Capturing the Moment (m/f, erotic fiction, second chances), published in 2016. In 2016, she also edited the charity anthology Coming Together: Under the Mistletoe, which raised money for Project Linus.
Delilah is a writer who doesn't take herself too seriously, and she hopes you'll join her as she continues down this road.
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