Book Review: This is Not a Holiday Romance

By Sara Steven

Nina Thompson has one Christmas wish: to avoid her brother’s obnoxiously handsome best friend, Tristan, like the plague. From the moment he humiliated her as a teenager to their escalating revenge schemes, Nina and Tristan’s relationship can only be defined as an all-out prank war! And there is yet to be a winner.

But it just so happens the ghost of Christmas present has other ideas. When Tristan unexpectedly crashes her family’s Christmas, Nina’s dreams of a peaceful holiday vanish faster than Santa up a chimney. Determined to end their rivalry for good, she braces herself for one last prank-filled showdown.

But when they find themselves snowed in, with no way of avoiding each other amongst the holiday festivities, they discover their heated exchanges have been masking a different kind of sizzle. Caught in a snow globe of holiday romance, they decide to let their fiery chemistry burn bright—but this is absolutely and unequivocally nothing more than a secret fling destined to melt with the snow, this is not a forever romance… (Synopsis courtesy of Goodreads.)

This is NOT your average enemies to lovers romance! 

I really loved the premise behind This Is Not a Holiday Romance. From the get go, the reader discovers just how much Nina and Tristan despise each other, and for good reason: Tristan has gone out of his way to humiliate Nina at every turn, and Nina does all she can to torture Tristan to the best of her ability. The moment that starts their years-long feud begins with some taunting that Tristan had felt was harmless, back when he and Nina were teens, but for Nina, it was anything but harmless. (I had never heard of the term ‘jug ears’ before reading this book and had to look it up to gain a better understanding of the phrase.) Tristan thinks his nickname for Nina, “Gremlin,” is cute, but Nina thinks it’s anything but cute. She considers it a severe insult. 

It lended Nina into making it her mission to drive Tristan crazy–whether than means sticking his suitcase out into subzero temperatures, making him go outdoors in the snow to retrieve it, or inviting her friends over to the apartment Tristan shares with her brother, Dylan, knowing how much Tristan hates to have his environment (and his food) tampered with by anyone he isn’t comfortable around and doesn’t know well. They seem to continually try to one-up one another, and it reminded me of kids who like to tease on the playground. The ones you wanted to mess with the most seemed to always be the ones you wanted to gain the most attention from. It did feel as though there were a lot of unresolved feelings between the two characters, only later feeding into an obvious hate to love/love to hate relationship. 

The bottom line is, Tristan and Nina don’t really know each other as well as they always assumed they had–not in the ways that count the most. Nina never really understood why her brother would invite Tristan to their own family holiday functions, and Tristan thought for sure that Nina knew the Gremlin moniker was done out of affection. That they were in on the same joke, so to speak. As the days progress and the two are stuck together due to some nasty holiday weather, their walls begin to thaw, and they allow one another in.

Ultimately, family intervenes and threatens to destroy those thawed walls, and Tristan has to make a choice. Nina figures it’s one of the biggest pranks of all–that Tristan had pretended to potentially like her, only in an effort to later break her heart. Can Tristan stand on his own feet and do what’s best for him, regardless of what others think, and can Nina ever truly forgive Tristan? Really, the two characters are a lot of fun to read and they have so much spunk and wit, the dialogue was a joy to engage in. Given just how much the two like to antagonize each other, it didn’t surprise me that there was more going on behind the scenes. It was a great five-star experience!

Thanks to Rachel's Random Resources for the book in exchange for an honest review.

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Camilla Isley is an engineer who left science behind to write bestselling contemporary rom-coms set all around the world. She lives in Italy.

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