Secret crushes, spicy Christmas treats, heinous holiday traffic, and a fateful snowstorm bring good friends together in a funny, heartfelt short story by bestselling author Olivia Dade.
Nina and William are underpaid adjunct professors at the same university, where winter break is no break at all: ’tis the season to make extra money. When their holiday side hustle has them stranded by a blinding blizzard in the middle of nowhere, there’s nothing to do but cuddle up for warmth and play a game of Never Have I Ever to pass the time. But in the game of love, secrets never stay secret for long…
Olivia Dade’s All by My Elf is part of Under the Mistletoe, a stirring collection of December romances that thrill and tingle all the way. They can be read or listened to in one swoony sitting.

My Review:

What do you do with a used Weinermobile? Does what happens in the Weinermobile STAY in the Weinermobile? Have you ever wondered? Inquiring minds actually get to find out in All By My Elf.

The answers to those questions coincide with a few considerably less humorous and more down-to-earth questions about the lengths (pun definitely intended) that part-time college professors will go to in order to keep feeding their dreams of the ivory towers of academia while still managing to feed themselves on stipends that barely allow them to make ends wave at each other.

Most of all – and best of all – All By My Elf is a romance that satisfies the craving for a hot, steamy friends into lovers romance that toasts a nearly frozen night in a grey-market Weinermobile into a story that’s way bigger than even a 27 foot long hot dog in a bun – or equally long mincemeat-filled roll of phyllo dough in a Mincemobile – could ever manage to contain.

Escape Rating B: Believe it or not, the puns are part of the story – and they are groaners even when Adjunct Professors Nina Teems and William Dern aren’t moaning together in the back of the weiner.

(Speaking of groaners, if the title of this story is giving you an earworm that refuses to let itself be nailed down, that’s because the earworm is tripping over the slight difference between the book’s title and the song’s title, which is ‘All By Myself’, originally performed by Eric Carmen in 1975 but also covered by Sheryl Crow in 1993 and Céline Dion in 1996.)

So, even though there’s nothing either light or fluffy about a giant hot dog nestled in an even bigger bun – the story itself has plenty of both as well as being the perfect steamy antidote to all of Thanksgiving’s turkey and trimmings – not to mention the rock solid nature of some traditional holiday fruitcakes.

After yesterday’s book, which turned out to be more Xmas and less Halloween than I expected, I found myself looking for a lighter and fluffier story to ease us all into the holiday season and especially the 2024 Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon that begins tomorrow. I chose this particular short story in the Under the Mistletoe collection because I loved the author’s Spoiler Alert series and was hoping for some of the same laughs amid the romance.

Which I definitely got even if I’m not all that fond of hot dogs and I’ve never had mincemeat in any form – let alone this particular version – that I can recall. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to even think of it again without giggling at least a bit.

All By My Elf takes a gigantic misunderstandammit and turns up the heat between two friends who have epic crushes on each other and are afraid to act on them. At least until the Mincemobile gets stuck in an epic blizzard and they need each other’s body heat to keep from freezing to death. (That’s not really a spoiler as this is a short story and the inevitable is so obvious it can be seen from outer space.) This scenario is one that gets used in romance and in fanfiction ALL THE TIME, and it’s a classic for a reason. It works. It really, really works – no matter how contrived the machinations for getting the couple into it.

If you’re looking for a quick read that combines warmth and heat and more than a few groaning laughs, All By My Elf is a fun, quick, read or listen to give you an excuse to put your feet up and your mind on coast for a few minutes during the busy holiday season.