Genre: second chance romance

A- #AudioBookReview: You Better Not Pout by Mia Sosa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: You Better Not Pout by Mia SosaYou Better Not Pout (Home Sweet Holidays) by Mia Sosa
Narrator: Andre Santana, Gisela Chípe
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy, second chance romance
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #4
Pages: 51
Length: 1 hour and 19 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

A freshly broken-up couple agrees to grin and bear it for their family’s sake in a story about the healing power of the holidays from Mia Sosa, USA Today bestselling author of The Worst Best Man.

Juliana and Eric called off their engagement—but Christmas with the family is just around the corner, so things are going to get awkward, fast. Unless, of course, they pretend the wedding is still on. But the holidays are gonna holiday. And the only thing harder than pretending they’re still in love is trying not to fall for each other all over again.

Mia Sosa’s You Better Not Pout is part of Home Sweet Holidays, a cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances sure to bring color to your cheeks. Read or listen to each story in a single heart-fluttering sitting. And to fully immerse yourself in the charm of the season, don’t miss a special message from each of our holiday heroes!

My Review:

If the title of this one sounds familiar, there’s an excellent reason. The title is a line from one of the truly classic Christmas songs that has been playing everywhere since, well, Halloween. Because “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” on Christmas Eve, which is TONIGHT.

The song has been recorded by over 200 artists from Bing Crosby to Lady Gaga. You’ve undoubtedly heard somebody sing it sometime this holiday season. And probably every holiday season before and every one after.

Santa Claus may, or may not, be coming to Juliana and Eric this year. Because they’ve been naughty.

Technically, that’s not true. Or at least it hasn’t been true until the holidays. They’ve decided not to go through with their engagement. They’ve realized they STILL love each other, but that they just aren’t the right person for each other.

The naughtiness is in deciding to fake their engagement through those same holidays so as not to upset her family’s just barely righted applecart. Again, not for any nefarious reasons, just that her mother has been ill for a lot of the year, she’s just recovered, and Juliana doesn’t want to put this stress on her just when she’s feeling better.

Equally true, Juliana doesn’t want to spend the entire holiday being the center of her nosy family’s intrusive attention – and it’s hard to blame her for that. The stress of the holidays is enough without every single person in your family wanting to know what YOU did wrong and offering endless reams of unsolicited, unwelcome but utterly well-meaning advice on how to fix things.

The problem with Juliana and Eric’s deal – that he agree to fake their engagement for the holidays with her family in return for Juliana’s agreement to let him have sole possession of their rent-controlled apartment in the breakup – is twofold. Or maybe that’s three-fold. There are a LOT of folding problems, as they need to fold, together, into Juliana’s old bedroom with its too small bed for the duration of their visit. A bed that is both too close for comfort and not nearly close enough, as they both still have feelings and DEFINITELY still have chemistry.

But the real stumbling block to pulling off this deception is the same thing that also saves them. OTOH, Juliana’s family knows both of them entirely too well not to pick up that there’s something wrong. And on the other, Juliana and Eric don’t know each other half as well as think they do – or as they should.

And that’s a situation they can fix – if they’re both willing to listen, even amid the chaos of a big, LOUD, family celebration. If they can just catch a bit of quiet amid that chaos, they have a chance to make things right. They just have to hear each other over all the noise of the holidays. And the relatives.

Escape Rating A-: In the original blurb for the Home Sweet Holidays collection, we were promised cookies. There have been no cookies, but the stories have all been sweet holiday treats just the same.

Even if the treats in this particular story are Puerto Rican pasteles that are as savory as they are sweet. Which is just right for this final story in the series, as the problems that Juliana and Eric are facing definitely have the savor of reality in more ways than one – starting with the issue of splitting that New York City rent-stabilized apartment.

I listened to this story and, as is usual in this collection the narrators were EXCELLENT. The thing is that I picked it up in the middle of reading The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah because I was looking for a story that would be a bit lighter throughout. At the point I was reading, I knew there was an HEA coming but the going was a big tough for the characters. That story is titled “Eight Heartbreaks” for a reason.

While You Better Not Pout is a bit lighter, if only because Juliana and Eric haven’t had enough time to pack THAT MUCH heavy emotional baggage between them, on the surface at least, the issues between Juliana and Eric are VERY similar to the issues between Evelyn and David in their romance. Under that surface, Juliana and Evelyn are coming from different places, but the way their respective traumas manifest is the same. They both bury themselves in work because it soothes their anxieties.

The difference is that Evelyn is a workaholic to avoid feeling her own feelings, while Juliana is a workaholic because it gives her a sense of safety and security. That if she earns her own money then no one can take it away from her or hold it over her head the way that her father did with her mother.

None of which is remotely obvious to Eric. He just sees that she’s too busy, too frantic and too overburdened to live her life – so it’s living her. She has no boundaries with her bosses but plenty with everyone else and its not working for either of them.

At the same time, Eric keeps trying to fix things FOR HER instead of letting her tell him what’s really going on inside her head. He means well, he’s trying really hard, but he’s barking up the wrong tree to mix metaphors completely. (Not that there’s not a literal tree in this story because it’s Christmas and of course there is.)

All of which means that their relationship – and the problems in it – felt very real. That this holiday romance, while it takes place over the short span of the Christmas holidays, is really working from two plus years of relationship history, made the rather quick holiday story have more than enough depth for them to earn their Happy Ever After.

Which made this a terrific story to wrap up this sweet – and just a bit savory – Home Sweet Holidays collection of sweet holiday romance treats!

#BookReview: The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean Meltzer

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean MeltzerThe Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean Meltzer
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Hanukkah romance, holiday romance, second chance romance
Pages: 368
Published by Mira on October 21, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Can these exes rekindle their love this Hanukkah?
Evelyn Schwartz has the perfect Hanukkah planned: eight jam-packed days producing the live-action televised musical of A Christmas Carol. Who needs family when you’ve got long hours, impossible deadlines, and your dream job? That is, until an accident on set lands her in the medical bay with one of her chronic migraines, and she’s shocked to find her ex-husband, David Adler, filling in for the usual studio doctor.
It’s been two years since David walked away from Evelyn and their life in Manhattan, and his ex-wife is still the same workaholic who puts her career before everything else—especially her health. But when Evelyn begins hallucinating “ghosts” tied to her past heartbreaks, and every single one leads to David, he finds himself spending much more time with her than he anticipated. And denying the still-smoldering chemistry between them becomes impossible.
As Evelyn revisits her ghosts of Hanukkah past, she and David both begin to wonder if they can have a Hanukkah future. But with a high-stakes production ramping up the pressure on Evelyn, and troublesome spirits forcing them both to confront their most difficult shared memories, it might just take a Hanukkah miracle for these two exes to light the flame on their second-chance at love.

My Review:

Everyone knows the story of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – if not from the book itself then from one – or more likely more – of the many, many TV and movie adaptations. My two favorites are still Mr. Magoo’s cartoon from the 1960s and the Muppets’ version from the 1990s.

The idea of the story is eternal, that anyone can atone, that anyone can be redeemed, that anyone can learn to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas with a big enough ‘wake-up’ call. Even if it’s not really a real wake-up call as it is in the recent A Christmas Witness. Which maybe worked even better because it wasn’t exactly real.

After all, even in Dickens’ original version, it did all turn out to be a dream. Just a very powerful one.

This is the first Hanukkah version of Dickens’ classic that I’ve ever read. (If this idea has been done before, please, please, PLEASE let me know in the comments! The original Dickens’ story is one of my favorites, but Hanukkah is my holiday so more versions of this combo are VERY tempting!)

The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah takes that old, familiar, much beloved Christmas classic and gives it both a Jewish twist and a whole lot more time to work its holiday magic. The spirits needed to work their magic on Scrooge in a single night, where the Heartbreaks of Hanukkah have eight whole nights to weave their spell.

And they’ll need every night of it, because Evelyn Schwartz is a really tough nut to crack and she has a lot of heartbreak to work her way through this Hanukkah. Which is, at its heart or hers (pun fully intended) a huge part of why Evelyn’s heartbreaks loom so large over the holidays. Because she’s managed her whole life NOT working her way through her trauma and grief.

She shoves it all down, each and every time, and buries herself in work instead of letting herself be buried in her grief. But this Hanukkah it’s time for her to pay the price of all that avoidance.

If she won’t let herself feel her feelings and grieve for her own losses, this Hanukkah, for eight long nights and eight painfully debilitating migraines, they’re coming for her. One night, one loss, one grief, one heartbreak at a time.

Escape Rating B: This is going to be one of those mixed feelings reviews – and I have LOTS of them when it comes to this book.

First, the concept behind this story is fantastic. A Christmas Carol, with its magical story of redemption, is a beloved classic for a reason. And the idea of putting a Jewish twist on it is so much genius I’m astonished that I haven’t found one before.

Howsomever, the same thing that makes the insta-love in holiday romances work so much better in a Hanukkah romance than a Christmas romance because it has more time to work with had the opposite effect here. Each of Evelyn’s individual heartbreaks was a LOT. Eight of them felt like too many. Not because they weren’t each heartbreaking, but because they were all, sorta/kinda, the SAME heartbreak.

Evelyn’s heartbreaks were ALL Bruno. Not a person, but the song from Encanto. As in “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” Evelyn Schwartz doesn’t talk about her problems, or her hurts or her worries or her griefs. She pushes them down and away so that she can bury herself in her work and push them away even more.

That Evelyn is a television producer makes her self-appointed task VERY easy. There’s always another crisis, there’s always another last minute change, and there’s always another male studio executive looking for her to fail and prove him right that TV producing is a man’s job and women just can’t cut it.

So Evelyn’s eight heartbreaks, while they have different causes, all boil down to the same thing in the end. That Evelyn buries her feelings in work every single time. To the point that when she and her then-husband had to bury their baby girl, they couldn’t grieve together because Evelyn couldn’t let herself feel her own feelings and left him alone with his.

Evelyn’s eight heartbreaks visit her, night after night, because her long-buried feelings and her lifelong ambitions have had a head on collision. Literally as the situation has sent her migraines into overdrive.

She’s the Executive Producer of a planned production of A Christmas Carol scheduled to be performed and broadcast LIVE on Christmas Eve. If the program is successful in EVERY SINGLE WAY, it’s the making of her career and the fulfillment of all her professional dreams. But if it isn’t absolutely perfect, it will mark the end of those same dreams.

Just as Evelyn is gearing up and grinding towards the final rehearsals, as her expensive, mercurial, high-maintenance star is about to arrive on set – a different issue arises in the person of her ex-husband David, as the studio’s stand-in medical doctor while the regular MD is on vacation.

Their chemistry is still incendiary – like kerosene and matches. But there’s still plenty smoldering under that white-hot surface. They’ve never gotten over each other, but they’ve also never gotten past the grief over their shared loss. And they need to – whether to make a new something together or make new lives separately – because neither of them has moved on an inch in any of the ways that matter.

In the end, just as the story is Evelyn’s redemption, or at least her path towards letting people in, letting herself feel her own feelings, a somewhat healthier work-life balance AND her acceptance that therapy might help her with all of the above, the story does redeem itself. I absolutely loved its multiple twists on the message of A Christmas Carol and the way it made me rethink the whole story at the end. But it is STILL a lot. A lot of heartbreak, a lot of grief and a lot of arguments leading to a hard-fought-for happy ending.

But this is absolutely not your typical holiday romance. It’s certainly not a romcom. If that’s what you’re looking for, or if it’s not what you’re looking for right now, it may not be the right book or the right time. Because it takes a lot of heartbreak to bring about this particular holiday miracle. A situation which will put some readers in the holiday spirit while perhaps making others reach for the holiday spirits. Your reading – and possibly drinking – mileage may vary.