Two years ago, my first review of the year was Make You Mine This Christmas by Lizzie Huxley-Jones. I loved that book, it’s a 4.5-star banger that I hope more and more people find and enjoy. I received it through my Illumicrate Afterlight subscription, and a few months ago they alerted me that they would be doing an exclusive edition of its follow-up Under the Mistletoe with You which I immediately scooped up and saved for my holiday week reading.
Under the Mistletoe with You picks up a year after the events of Make You Mine This Christmas, with Christopher having gone to baking school, sold his London flat, purchased a small bakery in northern Wales, and uprooted his life all while beginning to explore what it means to him to be bisexual in practice, not just in theory. But completely uprooting your life is hard, and Christopher has been slow to make new friends (Shaz is a DELIGHT) and Christopher spent a lot of time over the past three months watching streaming cozy Christmas movies starring one Nash Nadeau. Christopher has closed the bakery for a week to go visit Kit and Haf around the holidays and found someone to stay in his flat while he’s away to keep on eye on the place and off-set the lost revenue of closing. But then an apocalyptic snowstorm closes all transportation, and the lodger turns out to be Nash Nadeau himself.
Nash has fled Hollywood for the holidays for his own reasons, and while he is going to have to sort some things out, he’s also relieved to be pulled into the town’s emergency response to the storm while he and Christopher work out how to share the small one-bedroom flat above the bakery. There’s an instant spark – Christopher pretends not to know who Nash is, but Nash is on to him quickly and let’s it all play out.
This one is all about community feeling. It features the quick banter that shone so beautifully in Make You Mine This Christmas, and the friend group chat was a good way to keep Kit, Haf, Laurel, and Ambrose in the story, and give the reader another angle on Christopher. It’s also chock full of representation, this is a M/M romance featuring a bisexual and a trans man, with neurodivergence and disability also in play. It’s a quick timeline story, but Huxley-Jones spends just the right amount of time diving into the minutiae to make it all work in my brain without pulling me out. An extremely solid 4-star book to start the year.
