Farah Heron’s A Little Holiday Fling is a lovely secularly Christmas romance. As a secular Christmas celebrator, I appreciated both Ruby’s position of finding joy and fun in the season and Rashid’s frustration with the consumerism and the hegemony of it all. Ruby and Rashid are both Muslim and they’ve grown up in Canada and the UK respectively, so they have a complex relationship with the dominant religious holiday. A Little Holiday Fling deals lightly and gently with some heavy topics, giving depth to the characters without violating the holiday feeling.
Ruby and Rashid meet when she impulse buys a Christmas tree and drops it on Rashid while trying to carry it home without damaging her vintage wool coat. Rashid grumpily carries the tree home for her and she offers that if he comes to the high end shop where she works, she will gift wrap presents for him as a thank you. He does and they strikes sparks – of attraction and annoyance. Things go badly and Ruby assumes they’ll never see each other again. Since she is moving to the UK in a month, that seems like a reasonable assumption. This is a romance, so of course they do see each other again, and there are two little girls, Rashid’s nieces, who could benefit from some holiday cheer, and Rashid’s family is well placed to help Ruby achieve some professional dreams. They agree to help each other and the girls by going on holiday themed outings. Assumptions are made. Ruby yells at Rashid several times. Rashid listens and processes the ways in which he’s been a bonehead. Since they are both in town temporarily, they agree to a little holiday fling to go along with the merrymaking for the kids.
Farah Heron brings together a number of her past book characters to give Ruby the found family she didn’t know she had. I’ve read some of the books and it was nice to see how the characters are flourishing. I particularly enjoyed the way Heron builds conflict in to Ruby and Rashid’s relationship without either of them necessarily being wrong – blinkered by privilege and shaped by trauma, but not wrong. Heron slowly peels away the layers of Ruby and Rashid’s characters so that these Christmas loving sunshine and Christmas hating grump archetypes become nuanced and relatable people.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Forever (Grand Central Publishing) and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.