Bask in the warm glow of the menorah in this debut Jewish rom-com featuring a hard of hearing hero and a Chanukah meet-cute.
Andie Williams is not looking forward to spending her first Chanukah alone after her father’s death. About to lose her job, with her only prospect for another work opportunity across the country, she could use some chutzpah to make it through the eight nights alone.
Leo Dentz has had a crush on the girl across the hall from his apartment for years but has never had the courage to say anything—until she drops her grocery bags and he notices her drug store Chanukah candles. Ready to take a chance outside of his comfort zone, Leo offers to join Andie on the first night, sharing his dinner with her. As Andie and Leo fall for each other one night at a time, and the clock ticks down on Andie’s move, will this season of miracles light their way forward?

My Review:

As ably demonstrated by both this book and Monday’s Love You a Latke, the eight nights of Hanukkah represent the perfect amount of time for a relatively quick but totally not insta-romance between two people who already know each other but don’t really KNOW each other.

You’ll see.

Andie and Leo have been neighbors in their apartment building for a while, more than long enough for them to have crushes on each other that they’ve each been either afraid, or too busy, or both to even attempt to figure out if there might be more.

That neither of them knows whether the other is Jewish is a part of that hesitation – and not an unreasonable part. It’s just that the list of reasons is long on both sides – Andie and her father were a tight-knit circle of two after the death of her mother and estrangement from the rest of his family, and he just passed away earlier in the year.

Leo – along with his younger brother Dean – have been locked in a terrible cycle of grudges and retribution over the future of their family business for the past twelve years. It’s even worse than it sounds, as the incident that Glen Dentz has been holding over his sons for more than a decade happened when Leo was in his mid-teens and Dean was even younger. They should NEVER have been roughhousing in the back of the family’s antiques store. BUT dumb behavior and teenagers do go hand in hand.

They’ve been making up for it ever since and there has been absolutely no budging on even the possibility of forgiveness on the part of their father. To the point where Leo and Dean are ready to buy the family business from their father – just as he got it from HIS father – and dear old dad is so caught up in his own bitterness that he’d rather sell it to a stranger than his own sons.

Who have been the ones actually running the business – and making a profit at it – for several years at this point.

Both Leo and Andie are on the horns of very different dilemmas – which is what makes for the best kind of realistic tension in romance. Andie is a preschool teacher, and the program she works for and LOVES is shutting down at the end of the year due to a lack of funds. Leo needs to decide just how much he can keep giving 110% to a business that may never be his – and more importantly – to a father who will never let his adult behavior redeem a not merely childISH but outright childHOOD mistake.

Andie has to decide whether to accept a job offer in Ohio, far away from the Boston area she loves that holds her friends and all of her memories of her beloved father. Leo has to decide whether it’s time to strike out on his own – even if that strikes any possibility of reconciliation with his father.

After a chance meeting in the hallway of their apartment building over a broken bag filled with some equally broken Hanukkah candles, Andie and Leo both decide to make this Hanukkah one to remember. With each other. Even if whatever relationship they build comes with a limited shelf life.

But Hanukkah is the season of miracles, and with the help of a magic menorah and a conniving ten-year-old, Leo and Andie might just manage to get a great one.

Escape Rating B: As part of being one of the Elves for this year’s Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon, I was looking for stories that were not the usual suspects when it comes to ‘holiday’ stories. Meaning either romances that were wrapped around holidays other than Xmas that are celebrated this time of year, like today’s book and Monday’s Love You a Latke, or are holiday stories but specifically not romances, such as yesterday’s marvelous combination of Sherlock Holmes and Christmas in What Child is This? (Still not a combo I was expecting but all the more fun because of it!)

Today’s Hanukkah romance is exactly the kind of cozy, feel good romance with just the right amount of will they/won’t they (of course they will!) tension to spice things up. that readers LOVE for the holidays. Along with just the right amount of spiciness to literally heat things up during an inconveniently convenient overnight power outage.

I adored Andie and Leo as a couple, and it was easy to feel for both of their personal dilemmas. Andie’s choice between a bird in the hand – an actual job offer – and the HOPE but uncertainty that she’ll find something in the place she wants to stay was very real. She has no one to rely on but herself. She needs a job to support that self. And she’s not wrong to worry that cuts to all kinds of social services including preschools will make her job search MUCH more difficult.

Leo’s family, on the other hand, is very much the kind of warm, nurturing, teasing and loving family she’s always secretly wished to be a part of. Her mother died when she was three, so her late father was the only parent she knew. They were close, their relationship was very tight and her loss is still so recent that the gnawing grief is fresh.

While Leo’s family – as wonderful as it is on the surface – has a canker in its heart. As much as she wishes she could be adopted by all of them, the relationship between Glen Dentz and his two sons is the kind of cancer that will destroy the family if he can’t be made to see the damage he’s already done.

And that’s the hard part of the story in more than one way. Families do go sour like this. If you haven’t ever seen it happen in real life you’ve been lucky. Very much like Abby’s toxic parents in Love You a Latke, I really wanted to see Glen have a, pardon me, come-to-Jesus epiphany one way or another. Which he did – unfortunately in exactly the way I was expecting, which blunted things a bit for this reader.

But Glen’s change of heart – or mind – or both – came way too easily. It was a bit like Scrooge in that the spirits did it all in one night. Or all in the consequences of one act of profound hubris, blind greed and utter stupidity. Consequently, the resulting forgiveness didn’t feel earned. Some miracles may be just too big for even Hanukkah to encompass.

Still, there is a LOT to love in Eight Nights to Win Her Heart. Including, but absolutely not limited to, the utterly hilarious foam sword fight between the attacking little Maccabees and the defending ‘King Leo’ at the children’s Hanukkah celebration at the Temple. And Millie. Conniving, manipulating, plotting, planning and ultimately successful little Millie. Who feels so justified after her success at matchmaking for her Uncle Leo that she’s planning to work her wiles on her Uncle Dean NEXT Hanukkah – if not sooner!