One of my favourite parts of the holiday season is all the holiday-themed romances coming out. I love all the Hallmark movies and Harlequin titles coming out around this time — the cheesier the better. So with a title like The Christmas Lights, I fully expected the Karen Swan novel to be along the same lines.

Despite the title, it wasn’t quite as Christmas-themed as I expected (the heroine wants Christmas in a cold country, the hero helps her and other characters with the tree, but there’s none of the usual holiday cheesiness). Still, it’s a lovely story, with a very sweet friends-to-lovers romance, and it’s set in a snow-swamped, icy small mountain town in Norway, so it’s a perfect story to enjoy with a hot cup of cocoa.

The Christmas Lights is about a pair of lifestyle bloggers and real-life couple Bo and Zac. Travelling with their manager/photographer Lenny, they’ve branded themselves the Wanderlusters, and share beautifully curated photographs of their adventures around the world with over 9 million followers. From the beginning of the novel, it’s clear Bo isn’t as happy with their lifestyle as she used to be — she misses home and wishes she and Zac could have more privacy.

Enter their latest adventure: a month in a remote shelf farm in Norway run by the ruggedly handsome but taciturn and often grumpy Anders, and his feisty 96-year-old grandma Signy. The farm is on a tiny ledge on the side of a mountain, accessible only through a ladder of metal rungs down the mountain’s face or via Anders’ helicopter, so it’s totally within Bo and Zac’s brand of ‘roughing it’ like locals do.

There are minor subplots about the beautiful marketing manager who joins them at the farm and an Instagram troll who may be stalking Bo in real life as well as on the Internet, but the crux of the story for me lies in the relationship between Bo and Anders. I love how gradually their friendship develops — Bo realizes that Anders is a different person when he’s with just her, because he’s more relaxed and while still taciturn, isn’t quite as grumpy as he often appears.

I also love how complex the characters are. Even though it may be easy to write Zac off as selfish and self-absorbed, Swan takes care to portray him as a major adrenaline junkie, and this helps us understand why he’s more into the whole social media thing than Bo is. I also love how Swan manages to show how sweet and caring Anders is, without giving up his natural reserve — he’s still mostly grumpy, but with a squishy heart within.

There’s also a parallel story line running throughout about Signy’s childhood. With these types of books, I’m often more intrigued by the historical storyline than the contemporary one, but in this case, I never really got engaged in Signy’s story. Most likely, it’s because she was only 14 when the major events in her story happen, and so wasn’t privy to some of the more compelling elements — I think I’d much prefer to have heard from her older sister Margot. Swan does try to draw some symbolic parallels between Signy and Bo, but it felt weak.

Like any good holiday read, the ending was heartwarming and sweet. I thought some elements were wrapped up somewhat abruptly, and I wasn’t thrilled with how they ultimately dealt with the Instagram troll (like, I understand the emotions behind it, but yikes). But overall, I enjoyed the book.

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Thank you to Publishers Group Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In Big Bad Cowboy, Maggie and Travis had a memorable sexy encounter in a shed during a masquerade ball where Maggie dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood and Travis was the Big Bad Wolf. After the masquerade, they continue sexting, the Big Bad Wolf ordering Little Red Riding Hood to do fun, naughty things over text. The kicker is that while Travis recognized Maggie behind the mask, Maggie has no idea who the Big Bad Wolf is, and assumes he’s a stranger.

Beyond the masks, Maggie runs the top landscape architect business in town, and resents Travis for taking away jobs from her company. Travis mostly just needs the money — his family owes a lot of back taxes on their ranch, and he also needs to support his five year old nephew. When a wealthy woman hires both of them to work together to renovate her estate, Maggie hates having to split the job, but also can’t help her growing attraction to Travis.

Okay, Big, Bad Cowboy was off-the-charts hot. And funny! I absolutely love Carly Bloom’s writing. She manages to inject the most mundane moments with so much sexual chemistry that even discussing the weather can have lots of unintentional double entendres when you’re doing it with a hot cowboy.

I especially love the light touch of BDSM in this book. The scenes where Maggie and Travis take on their Little Red Riding Hood and Big Bad Wolf personas are super sexy. I also often find in romance novels that books tend to have almost no BDSM at all, or they go hardcore BDSM, but Bloom manages to maintain a wonderfully delicate balance here where the sex scenes are just on the naughtier side of vanilla.

Beyond the heat factor, the humour really makes these characters feel real, and makes even some of the sexier scenes very endearing. In one of my favourite scenes, for example, Travis does a Magic Mike-type striptease, and we know how hot he is and how turned on Maggie is getting. But Bloom shows us this scene from Travis’ point of view, and so we also know how vulnerable he’s feeling as he strips. At one point, he glances over at Maggie with the thought that if he sees her laughing, the moment would be all over, but then sees that while she’s amused and teasing him throughout, he can see she’s not actually laughing at him, and so that he feels comfortable with continuing. It’s a beautifully written, very relatable moment, and a striking contrast to the freedom he and Maggie feel when behind their Wolf / Red Riding Hood masks.

In another favourite scene, Travis jokingly asks Maggie to demonstrate a seemingly impossible move from an erotica book she’s reading. Somehow, Bloom manages to make this one super hilarious, super sweet and super sexy all at the same time, and it’s simply fantastic.

I also really enjoyed the stories beyond the romance and the sex. Bloom has created a loveable cast of characters. I especially, absolutely love the JD subplot. Like the Travis and Maggie plot, JD’s subplot was just really sweet and felt very true to life. I also really enjoyed the whole drama Travis faced with his brother as it escalated the stakes beyond his relationship with Maggie, and made him an even more likeable character.

Big Bad Cowboy is sexy, sweet, funny and real. It’s a wonderful romance, and a nice, slightly naughty, bookish treat for the holidays.

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Thank you to Forever Romance for an egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Sometimes, the perfect book comes along at just the right time, and all you can do is thank the universe for giving you that book exactly when you needed it. For me, that book was Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis. I happened to be working on a personal goal when I decided to pick up this particular ARC, and next thing I knew, I was taking this book around everywhere I went, dipping into it whenever I needed a break or an energy boost to work on my goal, and thinking about all the people in my life to whom I wanted to gift this book for Christmas. I took a pen around with me wherever I went, just so I could underline passages that really spoke to me. Now, my copy is somewhat weather-worn, scribbled on and coffee-stained, but it’s all so worth it, and I’m sure I’ll end up adding more marks to it every time I re-read.

Rachel Hollis’ premise is simple: women spend too much time apologizing for our dreams. She gives the all-too-relatable example of how she used to minimize her own passion project — her website and social media work to inspire women to live their best life — as just a hobby when the reality was that she was already tracking thousands of followers and generating a lot of income. As women, we’re brought up to believe our worth lies in our value to other people — as a mother, daughter, sister, employee and so on — and Hollis says we need to own our dreams and assert our right to our own happiness.

It doesn’t seem like a super radical concept. Lots of self-help books cover similar themes. But Hollis’ writing style really spoke to me — she sounds conversational and excited, as if we’re just really good friends having coffee and she’s encouraging me to pursue the goals I’ve always dreamed of but kept pushing off to the side in favour of ‘real life’.

I also love that Hollis acknowledges that reality doesn’t always make it easy to follow your dreams. Possibly your reality is that you’re working three jobs to make ends meet. Or that you’re dealing with a screaming newborn baby and can’t just take time when you feel like it to train for that marathon. Hollis acknowledges these potential barriers, and encourages us to carve out whatever me-time we can, in a way that works for us. She also reminds us that we are worth a little me-time, and more importantly, that we do have the right to prioritize ourselves.

I’ve also come across a lot of self-help techniques on goal-setting, and I must say that again, Hollis’ version really resonated with me. She suggests setting a routine for yourself to focus on achieving your goal, whatever that may be, and then thinking of that routine like having a coffee date with Chris Hemsworth. If you had such a coffee date, you likely would keep it come hell or high water, and only a major emergency would drag you kicking and screaming away. Even if you’re tired or feeling lazy, you’ll likely still drag yourself out of bed to keep that date. And even if someone asks you for a last minute favour that conflicts with that date, you will likely say no unless circumstances are extremely dire. At least, that’s Hollis’ premise, and I can definitely attest it works for me. While working on my personal goal, I did experience moments where I was tired and wanted to put it off, or when I just wanted to stay in bed and cuddle with my cats. In those moments, thinking “coffee with Chris Hemsworth” actually did help me get out of bed and focus. Not because I manage to fool myself into thinking I actually did have a date with Chris Hemsworth, but because it is a tangible, concrete reminder of how important my goal — or rather, my commitment to myself — is to me.

Hollis’ approach isn’t perfect. The rah-rah-balls-to-the-wall approach, for example, won’t work if you’re going through a mental health experience, or if because of everything in your life, you physically don’t have the energy to work on your goal. And if you aren’t sure what you want to accomplish for yourself, you may want to take a moment to reflect on that before jumping in full throttle. But for me, the most important takeaway from this book is that, as women, we spend so much time and energy prioritizing other people’s needs, when we have every right — and in fact, every obligation — to prioritize ourselves and our hopes, dreams, secret wishes, every bit as much, if not more.

Unfortunately, Girl, Stop Apologizing doesn’t come out until March 2019 — I was so excited I couldn’t wait to post this — but Hollis does have a book out now Girl, Wash Your Face. I haven’t read that one yet, but if it’s anywhere as good as this one, I’d highly recommend checking it out. And just to get you in the mood to go forth and live the life you want without apology, here’s a video I love, of Keala Settle singing “This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman.

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Thank you to Harper Collins Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.