Series: Home Sweet Holidays

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!

A- #AudioBookReview: All Wrapped Up in You by Rosie Danan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: All Wrapped Up in You by Rosie DananAll Wrapped Up in You (Home Sweet Holidays) by Rosie Danan
Narrator: Robert Hatchet, Andi Eloise
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #3
Pages: 76
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

Holiday magic helps two oblivious neighbors discover just how close they are in bestselling author Rosie Danan’s cheerful short story about big comedy, small tragedies, and the gifts found in between.
When stand-up comedian Piper has a panic attack outside the club, it’s not funny. But Scott, a handsome ER doctor from the crowd, gives her something to smile about as he calms her down. Turns out they’re neighbors—they just don’t know it yet. When Christmas Eve presents an opportunity for them to get even closer, Scott and Piper realize they share much more than just a wall.
Rosie Danan’s All Wrapped Up in You 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:

The thing about these holiday shorts series(es), both this year’s Home Sweet Holidays and last year’s Under the Mistletoe, is that the stories are supposed to be short in length – and they are – so they often take place over a rather short time period to make things work. But speaking of making things work, while ‘love at first sight’ is a fun idea, in real life and a romance where the happy ever after needs to feel earned, somehow a bit of time needs to be shoehorned into that short time period.

Hanukkah romances, like this year’s Merry and Bright, use the eight nights of Hanukkah to their – and the reader’s – advantage. Hanukkah lasts, well, eight nights – and generally parts of the days between those nights. That may or may not be enough time to build a lifetime on, but it can be enough to set the starring couple firmly on that path.

After all, if your new love can fit in and or tolerate – or a bit of both – your family, however wacky or over-the-top or dysfunctional they might be, that’s a good start for a relationship. Also, EIGHT WHOLE NIGHTS.

Howsomever, this story in this year’s Home Sweet Holidays collection isn’t a Hanukkah story – so it needs a different method of making a short time feel longer than it is. A problem which the author solves, and delightfully so, by using a scenario similar to the setup of last year’s Only Santas in the Building.

Stand-up comedian Piper Sadler lives in a Chicago walk-up apartment building. There are only two apartments on each floor, they share a hallway and a window and Piper lives in 3B while her neighbor and secret crush lives in 3A. They’ve never met but they do exchange text messages on a regular basis to complain about the neighbor with the leaf-blower across the street at stupid o’clock in the morning, and to share in the care of 3A’s spider plant in the hallway that 3B is watering and generally keeping alive.

Even when they do meet, they don’t. Piper is outside a comedy club, going through her usual pre-performance case of jittery stage fright – outside, in Chicago, in December, freezing – when Dr. Scott Harrison opens the outside door, hears someone breathing in a pattern that is obviously an incipient panic attack, and goes out to help. Or at least be there if she needs help.

They talk. It’s the most real conversation he’s had in years, with anyone. Not because he’s antisocial or whatever, but because he’s in his third year of residency and working, sleeping, and eating are all about all he has left in him – and he often skips the latter two of those three. He keeps telling himself it will get better but himself isn’t always listening.

She goes onstage, he goes back to the audience, and they still don’t REALLY meet. They don’t meet until she turns up in his ER after a close encounter with a very large amp and a bleeding cut on her forehead.

Even then, they only sorta/kinda meet. They recognize each other from the comedy club – but still don’t know they are neighbors.

By the time they finally do meet, he’s slumped outside her apartment door, having locked himself out of his apartment in an exhausted daze. On Christmas Eve, with no locksmiths available and no friend with a spare couch – or even a spare rectangle of floor – left available that he can beg for the night.

So they haven’t met, but they already know each other. Better than they think they do. Which makes their insta-love not so instant at all. Instead, they’ve earned their holiday season meet-cute AND their hopes for a happy ever after.

Escape Rating A-: First, I loved this for it being Chicago. (I also loved that I lived in a building that sounds very much like the one in the story.) But I could feel the snow crunching underfoot and the freezing fingers of cold fingering their way through every seam of my coat and I felt nostalgic but was really happy not to be in it.

The story does a terrific job of making their brief actual acquaintance seem like a much longer, and surprisingly real, acquaintance. They don’t know each other but they do KNOW each other, and it works. (Only Santas in the Building did too if you like this trope.)

I listened to this one, and Andi Eloise (Piper) and Robert Hatchet (Scott), did a terrific job voicing their characters. The audio versions of these original stories are the perfect length for my daily drive and these stories are a perfect way to spend that drive and get a happy, sweet, pick-me-up story into the bargain.

So I’ve enjoyed this Home Sweet Holidays collection a lot. I also got a bit caught up in the original blurb description for the series (it’s changed) that described them as a “cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances.” I think they changed the blurb because they’re all sweet so far but they’re not cookies. Snow Place Like Home was the holiday fruitcake, Merry and Bright was a donut-like Hanukkah sufganiyot, while this entry in the series is a pumpkin pie. I have no idea which sweet holiday treat the final book in the collection, You Better Not Pout, is going to turn out to be, but we’ll all find out next week, because I’m planning to review that last book on Christmas Eve.

A- #AudioBookReview: Merry and Bright by Ali Rosen

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Merry and Bright by Ali RosenMerry and Bright (Home Sweet Holidays) by Ali Rosen
Narrator: Barrie Kreinik, Eric Nolan
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Hanukkah romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #2
Pages: 63
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

What starts as a Hail Mary fake romance scheme turns into the real deal in this delightful story of holiday deception from Ali Rosen, author of Alternate Endings and Recipe for Second Chances.
Miriam Brody is dreading Hanukkah with her overbearing family in Charleston. Ditto for dreamy pro football player Cal Durand and Christmas. After sharing a few flirty drinks on the flight there, the strangers conspire to tackle the holidays together, posing as a couple. But as shenanigans unfold, Miriam realizes her feelings are anything but fake. Uh-oh. Are they headed for a holiday miracle—or a holiday disaster?
Ali Rosen’s Merry and Bright 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:

Merry and Bright was every bit as delightful as last week’s Snow Place Like Home, and not just because of the cute title.

I am seeing that one of the treats of this year’s collection is the way that the stories extend the time the featured couple knows each other in order to make the instant romance seem not quite so instant. So far, it’s working for me.

But of course, with Merry and Bright, that’s at least in part because this is a Hanukkah story every bit as much – if not a bit more – than it is a Christmas story. This particular fake romance has eight nights to perform a Hanukkah miracle before it’s all set up to be fulfilled on Christmas.

It also helps that even though Miriam Brody and Cal Durand don’t know each other, they sorta/kinda do. They certainly know all the same people, and even the same neighborhood. They seem to have grown up within walking distance of each other in Charleston even though they must be just far apart enough in age to have not been in the same cohort growing up.

But that childhood proximity leads to some much more interesting adult proximity in the first class section of an airplane on its way to Charleston from New York City. It’s just over a week before Christmas, Hanukkah is about to begin, and neither Miriam nor Cal are looking forward to their family holidays.

Miriam was a VERY unexpected late-in-life child, and her parents, sisters, and in-laws all interrupt her, talk over her, ignore her, and generally treat her as though she’s still TWELVE when she’s nearly 30 and the owner of a VERY successful business. That she is almost the only introvert in a family of extroverts makes being home for the holidays less than fun no matter how much she loves her family. Which she does.

Cal isn’t looking forward to going home to his parents for his holidays because he’s been avoiding it and them for four years for reasons that he just doesn’t want to get into with ANYONE.

They both need buffers from their well-meaning but clueless families, even if those families are clueless for entirely different reasons. They’re both single, and they’ve had a grand time on the plane keeping their various hurts and tender places at bay.

So why not keep going? Why not be each other’s buffer with each other’s family? It’s only to get through the holidays, and then they can go their separate ways back in New York. They can help each other out. It’ll be fun!

Unless all that fake dating turns into real feelings. Dealing with THAT won’t be any fun at all. Unless they can somehow, in spite of their respective holiday baggage, work their way toward an even happier New Year.

Escape Rating A-: Just as in Snow Place Like Home, I got into this because I really, really felt for Miriam and her family dilemma. They do love her, and she does love them. But she’s been the only introvert in a family of extroverts all her life, and it’s only recently that one of her young nephews has joined her in the introvert section of the party.

(Also like Snow Place Like Home, the narrators for this story, Barrie Kreinik as Miriam and Eric Nolan as Cal, did a marvelous job of bringing these characters to life.)

Miriam’s family is loud and boisterous, and she doesn’t fit. That’s uncomfortable but okay. The way they treat her is teeth-grittingly unconscionable, but what works is the way that Cal instantly gets it – and her – the moment he steps into the room. (I did want her to have a big, pardon me considering which holidays we’re talking about, come to Jesus moment with her oblivious family, but, well, baby steps on that score are way more likely to work. Dammit.)

I loved seeing all the Hanukkah details and celebration in a story that is tailor-made for a Hallmark movie. (The delights of feeling seen are very real.) AND the eight nights of Hanukkah provide just enough time for the relationship between Miriam and Cal to get a firm hold on their – and the reader’s – hearts.

Which is when the story runs right into Cal’s family Christmas and the reason he’s been avoiding it. Everyone in that family is on pins and needles, walking on eggshells, living in stasis, all of the above, because Cal’s young wife was killed in a skiing accident four years before and everyone is waiting for Cal to start living again – even though he doesn’t feel like he deserves to.

Just as Cal made her feel seen among her family, she helps him feel heard among his own. Again, he loves them and vice versa, but he and his late wife grew up together and memories of her are EVERYWHERE in that house. Miriam gives him space to breathe and not just start to move on, but accept that it’s okay for him to do so.

If the stories in this Home Sweet Holidays collection represent holiday treats, just as Snow Place Like Home was the holiday fruitcake, Merry and Bright is a Hanukkah sufganiyot, a pillowy donut filled with a sweet jelly center, just as this story is has a lot of holiday light and a big, soft, sweet heart at its own.

I’m having a great time with this collection – and it’s just the perfect length for my daily drive! So I’ll be back next week with the third story, All Wrapped Up in You, and finishing up with You Better Not Pout on Christmas Eve. I’m looking forward to figuring out which holiday cookies match the themes of those stories!

A- #AudioBookReview: Snow Place Like Home by Laura Pavlov

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Snow Place Like Home by Laura PavlovSnow Place Like Home (Home Sweet Holidays) by Laura Pavlov
Narrator: Abigail Reno, Sean Masters
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, romantic comedy
Series: Home Sweet Holidays #1
Pages: 57
Length: 1 hour and 8 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 20, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

After a devastating breakup, a sunny veterinarian goes home to the mountains to lick her wounds—and savor a holiday snack—in this heartfelt story from Laura Pavlov, author of the Blushing series.
At her brother’s wedding, Goldie Jacobs brushes shoulders with Ace Bonetti, his childhood best friend turned Hollywood hotshot. Ace has been crushing on Goldie ever since high school, and seeing her again reminds him exactly why. They spend one toe-curling night together, then part ways, expecting nothing more. But when those moments under the mistletoe felt so right, how can they ever let each other go?
Laura Pavlov’s Snow Place Like Home 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:

The blurb for this year’s series of Amazon’s holiday originals collection, Home Sweet Holidays, proclaims that what they have in store for readers – and listeners, is a “cookie-sweet collection of holiday romances.”

This series opener, Snow Place Like Home, is plenty sweet – but it’s definitely the fruitcake of the collection. It’s a bit crazy, a bit spicy, and has more than a bit of whatever it will take to make the reader/listener a bit tipsy with delight.

Goldie Jacobs’ brother Jack, his fiancée Holly, and, in fact, the rest of her family, are what Goldie calls “those people”. Not in a bad way, not at all, but maybe just a bit much and over-the-top for Goldie.

Jack and Holly are getting married on Christmas Day, because they’re names are, well, Christmas-y. Every single thing about the wedding, from the date to the theme to the OMG costumes required for the rehearsal dinner, all have to be holiday-themed and all have to be pre-approved by the happy couple.

This isn’t bridezilla-ness, they’re like this for every single possible occasion all the time. They’re just that picture perfect and happy about it and want to share it with everyone around them. Whether the people they’re sharing with, like Goldie or Jack’s best friend Ace, are remotely into that sort of picture perfect planning and presentation or not. In Goldie’s case, definitely not.

It’s not that everyone, including Goldie, doesn’t always have a good time and won’t this time. Jack and Holly – and also Goldie’s parents Suzie and Joe – are really good at this kind of thing. But it’s not what Goldie would choose and she certainly wouldn’t choose to be in the spotlight – which is inevitable at least for a bit, because people who love the spotlight don’t always get that not everyone does.

As much fun, perversely fascinating, and often laugh-out-loud worthy the setup of this story is, the heart of the story is about the maid of honor and the best man, Goldie Jacobs and her brother’s lifelong bestie, Ace Bonetti. Back in the day, they had crushes on each other, never admitted it for real-life reasons, but equally never got over it.

Now they’re both adults, they’re single at the same time, and Ace’s brief visit back home is a chance for both of them to finally put their cards on the table. If they have the courage to take that chance to see if the dreams they’ve each kept so close to their hearts can turn into a real-life happy ever after.

Escape Rating A-: If this had been told from Jack and/or Holly’s perspective, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the story half as much as I did. Because I’d be on the sidelines with Goldie in this one, snarking at the over-the-top-ness of it all. What made it work for me is that both Goldie and Ace think the whole thing is ridiculous but they love these people and they’ll deal to be part of their celebration. But it’s not their thing and they both think it’s crazy. And it is crazy that their approved costumes were Rudolph for Goldie and The Grinch for Ace. (At least they’re both warm enough on this very cold and snowy Christmas Eve!) I loved their commentary, and also loved that they both let themselves go with it even if it’s definitely not their style.

It helped a LOT that I listened to this one, because the story is told from Goldie and Jack’s alternating first-person perspectives. It felt like I was perched on their shoulders, listening to their voices, telling me their thoughts. And Abigail Reno as Goldie and Sean Masters as Ace both did terrific jobs with the characters.

While the setup of the story is what earns the fruitcake, the heart of the story – what’s been in both Goldie’s and Ace’s own hearts all these years – is what makes the story such a sweet treat. While the romance straddles the line between two romantic tropes beautifully, specifically the best friend’s little sister taboo and the friends into lovers storylines, what makes this one special is that it’s the friends into lovers trope that wins the day. Back in high school, Ace did see Goldie as off-limits because he didn’t want to involve her in his family’s mess. She didn’t try to cross the line from friends into more because Ace is already an unofficial member of her family and she didn’t want to ruin that with a possible rejection.

Also, of course, they were teenagers and clueless, but it’s the friendship angle that sticks. HER family is HIS primary support, throwing a messy rejection into that wouldn’t have been fair to him. Now that they are adults there’s a real chance but her reluctance to rock the boat feels very realistic.

Which made the happy ever after just that much more delicious when it happens! Snow Place Like Home turned out to be the perfect holiday story to kick off this year’s collection. Now I can’t wait to start the next story, Merry and Bright, and not just because, in spite of the title, it’s a HANUKKAH STORY!