2021: Festive Erotica withYour Favorite Librarian
2022: More Festive Erotica with Your Favorite Librarian
We don’t really celebrate Boxing Day in America (unless you work in the sort of field that gives you the 26th off, you lucky dog), but for the last two years, my day-after-Christmas tradition has been disappointing my mother by reading self-published holiday romance novellas from my library’s ebook lending platform. (Ask your librarian about Hoopla today! Seriously. There’s some really good stuff on there, unlike the things you’re about to read about below.)
While the format of my reviews is unchanged—I’ll be rating the books for how much plot, steaminess, festive cheer they have (crucially not how good any of that stuff is), plus sharing my favorite quote and awarding each title a special superlative—something about me has. 2023 is the year that I became an actual reader of romance novels, which means that I now have something against which to compare my annual Yuletide dumpster fires.
And they are much, much worse than we thought. You’ve been warned.
Cruise for Christmas by Andrew Grey
Plot: ★☆☆☆
Steaminess: ★☆☆☆
Festive cheer: ★★☆☆
Best line: “And in the sea, Tim made love to me, holding our bodies together as we joined. It was absolutely magical; even the turtles were impressed.”
Superlative: Most Conflicted Disability Representation
Blurb: Henry Gilmore has always been unlucky in love, but when he’s gifted a solo spot on a gay Christmas cruise, he’s optimistic that this will be his chance to finally find a perfect guy—too bad the boat is fully booked with retirees! Shy medical examiner Tim Crawford is the only one on the ship close to Henry’s age and they hit it off, but will a surprise appearance from one of Henry’s exes sink their love story before it can even begin?
Verdict: Erotica is always more likely to succeed on a technical level when it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and while Cruise for Christmas isn’t good, it is kind of charming, like when your aunt gives you part of her sourdough starter even though you have celiac disease. Most of the story involves Henry pursuing Tim through various cruise activities and then getting minorly sexually assaulted by his ex-boyfriend so that there can be a third-act misunderstanding before the on-ship Christmas ball.
Apart from issues of craft (and the very 2008 way some things are handled), the only real problem I have with this one is how existentially threatening I personally find cruise ships. (I saw a television ad for the Icon of the Seas this weekend and it sent me into a spiral of dystopic depression just thinking about being on a ship with the entire population of Ludington.) Being able to happily go on a cruise by yourself is probably the fourth dark triad trait, and telling yourself that you’re in love with a man after hanging out with him for all of a week also rings alarm bells, but at least Henry didn’t propose to Tim by the time they got back to dock (that’s foreshadowing).
Holiday Abduction by Eve Langlais
Plot: ★★★☆
Steaminess: ★★☆☆
Festive cheer: ★☆☆☆
Best line: “He’d broken his pleasure droid with his vigorous technique, and there wasn’t a clean bordello in this sector.”
Superlative: Most Confusing Worldbuilding
Blurb: With the bank about to foreclose on her grandparents’ farm the day before Christmas, the last thing Jilly Carver needs is an alien to drop out of the sky demanding the priceless treasure apparently hidden somewhere in the farmhouse. But this super-sexy spaceman isn’t the only one after Jilly’s treasure. As their pursuers close in, Vhyl is forced to choose between the prize that he came to Earth for… and the one that he found along the way. What the frukx [sic] is an intergalactic mercenary space captain to do?
Verdict: Can we please talk about these aliens? Because sci-fi creature design is one of my favorite things and I have questions. We know from the descriptions of Vhyl that he is basically human-shaped—or we really don’t but it’s left assumed—but with purple skin, black lips, and pointy teeth. He also doesn’t have nipples or external testicles (none of the “evolutionized species” do, you see, because otherwise they’d “risk having future generations of virile perfection exposed to injury”), but comes with built-in birth control and Babel fish, which is why he can speak and understand English, obviously.
Thankfully for the purposes of our story but not for my mental health, Vhyl does come with other external genitals and Jilly might be just a little too eager to interact with them. Not just because Vhyl caused her house to be exploded by malevolent alien forces (and also punched a lot of agents of the US government) like half an hour ago, but also because he truly remarkable chauvinist, which is apparently apparently a trait that he shares with all of his species because Aresstolian woman—excuse me, females—are all so naturally passive that the men just have to be in charge of them, for their own sakes, you know?
The narrative attempts to get around its sexist hero by having Jilly call him out once or twice and attempting to characterize her as a hard-talking, gun-toting don’t-need-no-man-but-also-kinda-likes-it-when-a-man-uses-possessive-language-to-refer-to-her badass who can stand toe-to-toe with him (having your alpha and eating him too, as it were). However the stakes and pace of the situation (aliens, explosions, the Feds), plus the fact that Vhyl does not and is not interested in changing, make her seem a little less like Ellen Ripley and a little more like she’s going to let him condescend to women as a totality as long as she gets to sexily bite him on the lip when he does it to her specifically. At least in the epilogue she really sticks it to him by making him dress up in a Santa suit at the Christmas party she goes to with all of the other kidnapped women and their abductors/lovers from the other books in the series. Move over, The Left Hand of Darkness.
The Billionaire’s Dark Melody by Michelle Love
Plot: ★★★★
Steaminess: ★★★☆
Festive cheer: ★☆☆☆
Best line: “‘I love that idea,’ Atlas nodded. ‘I can see you doing some jazz Pearl Jam.””
Superlative: Most Anticlimactic Car Crash
Blurb: Finding herself pregnant after a night of anonymous sex with a masked man in a kink club, aspiring jazz singer Ebony Verlaine does her best to put it out her mind—after all, she’s just booked a gig to sing at a Christmas fundraising event organized by sexy Seattle billionaire Atlas Tigri. When Ebony meets Atlas sparks fly, but will her secret baby jeopardize her new chance at happiness?
Verdict: People who are familiar with romance books may be surprised that it took me this long to get to a secret baby one; people unfamiliar may be surprised (and appalled) to learn that yes, that is its own genre. I, meanwhile, was surprised and delighted to discover that this is a direct sequel to my favorite(?) festive smut from 2021, The Naughty One. Blue and Romy are back, married with kids, and still having wildly inappropriate hospital sex.
Reading Michelle Love is like watching a clown car crash and usually with a similar body count. In order for you to get a sense of what this book is like, let me just break down the scene where that secret baby is revealed to the main cast. At this point in the story, Atlas is aware of the baby and how it was conceived, committed to raising it as his own, and married to Ebony (he met her like two weeks ago, for context). He’s also embroiled in a custody battle with his loathed step-brother Cormac over their nephew Fino, the son of Altas’ biological brother who was recently shot to death in his backyard by a hitman working for Carson Franks, a man who Atlas recently punched in the parking lot of the women’s shelter/domestic-violence-exclusive emergency room where Romy works and that Atlas funds after Romy was unable to save Carson’s girlfriend’s life when Carson stabbed her sixteen times, for which Carson had Atlas’ twin brother killed thinking that he was Atlas and personally attacked Romy in the hospital where Blue works. Still with me? Okay. Cormac stands up in family court and shouts (I’m paraphrasing), “It was ME under that mask in the New Orleans sex club two months ago, Ebony! Which makes ME the father of your unborn child! Atlas, your wife is a goddamned whore!” at which point Atlas tries to fight Cormac but gets hauled off him by everyone’s respective bodyguards so that Ebony can run away sobbing after Atlas yells at her that he never wants to see her again because he’s willing to marry a girl he’s just met who got pregnant after a one-night stand in a BDSM club but not if that one-night stand happens to be a relative that he dislikes, even though Ebony herself did not know that.
It’s poetry. It’s perfection. It’s made even better when Carson kidnaps Ebony and Fino from the aquarium with the help of Atlas’ step-father’s third wife’s daughter (don’t worry, she pays for her misdeeds when Carson shoots her and also one of his henchmen during the getaway, because he’s just. that. evil), but then less better when Carson crashes the car that he’s driving with his victims inside into an unmarked cop car and that’s how the big bad is stopped. That disappointment aside, The Billionaire’s Dark Melody is a Michelle Love classic, with all of the hallmarks of her brand: horrible prose, worse dialogue, nonsensical plotting, ridiculous names, billionaires who don’t appear to have jobs, serial-killing stalkers, traumatized children, and yes, “diamond-hard” male genitalia. Merry Christmas to me.
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These posts are quickly becoming one of my favorite holiday traditions. Thank you for reading holiday erotica so I don’t have to.