Can a porn producer make a wholesome Christmas movie? In Romancelandia, all things are possible.
Plot: Uncle Ray Ray is one of the more prominent porn producers in the US, and he desperately needs to branch out to pay for his kids’ college and whatnot. And what else has a similar production process to porn from the fast faced writing, shooting and production? Hallmark Hope Channel movies! He even scored a semi-famous former boy band singer with name recognition! Obviously, no one can know, so he’s going to create a different company with totally different people and… Oh, those people all got sick two weeks before filming started. Right. Okay. Porn staff it is. Including Bee Hobbes, one of the most famous plus sized adult film stars to lead against his 90’s bad boy. She’ll just use a different name. Shenanigans ensue.
Christmas theme books are are really difficult balancing act. For one, the theme has been done to death, came back to life, killed again, and then we ate all of the chocolate eggs it lay. But you still have to somehow fit the damn theme in, don’t you? And this is actually quite a clever way to do it. If you’re a romance reader, you’ve almost certainly watched at least one or two Christmas romance movies, and if you’re reading an open doors romance novel, you probably don’t hold those movies in the highest esteem. But you probably also don’t hate them as much as you wish you did. So we’ve got a solid base.
The other piece is that you have to pick a lane – funny and irreverent or drama, because frankly, you either want one or the other to make it through the season. Here we start to lose a little steam, because the book tries to do both. There are the sort of jokes that you would expect about sex toys, cheesy 90’s music, vapid Christmas movie plots, even a Christmas-themed strip club.
And about as much, if not more, drama around Nolan (boy band)’s family coping with the decline of his career concurrent with becoming his mom’s primary caregiver, who is living with severe mental illness while also grieving his dad, and trying to be a sort of dad to his high school aged sister. Then there’s Bee, dealing with fatphobia, sexual harassment, bullying, stigma around sex work, etc.
But, at least for my liking, it doesn’t have enough humour in it to be a funny book (which is what it advertises itself as being), and the dramatic parts, despite how much airtime they get, are solved easily, quickly, and with little fuss, making them, to me, not particularly satisfying. Also, considering Bee brought an entire suitcase of sex toys, this book was among the most vanilla I’ve ever read, and I am the mayor of Vanilla Town.
Thirdly, a basic tenant of writing is for there to be some connection between your title and your story. There’s no meet cute. At all. Merry or otherwise. I kept waiting for that and since everyone seemed to already know Bee it literally took me the first third of the book to figure out who the hero was.
It’s also really long. At least a Hallmark movie can be watched in 90 minutes with a bunch of drunk friends.