His Christmas Escape by Shona Husk

This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

Title: His Christmas Escape
Author: Shona Husk
Series: Rainbow Cove Christmas #5
Published by: Escape Publishing
Release Date: November 27, 2020
Format: eARC
Pages: 250
Genres: Romance, Holiday, Contemporary
Source: NetGalley
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2020 Diversity Reading Challenge, Lenoreo's 2020 HoHoHo Readathon, Lenoreo's 2020 Netgalley and Edelweiss Challenge, Lenoreo's 2020 New Release Challenge, Lenoreo's COYER Quarantine Edition
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks
My rating:

Blurb:

One gourmet party. Six potential couples. The taste of love?

Nico De Luca has been doing his best to keep his family together and off the street since he was sixteen. Everyone thinks he's doing such a good thing, but they never care about the cost to him. With his stepfather fresh out of jail ... again ... trouble is brewing.

Coming home after travelling is always bittersweet for Jade Russell. She loves seeing her sister and friends, but her parents have made it very clear she's not welcome. Christmas is full of fake happiness and spending money on junk people don't want. She sees it in the parents' eyes in her job as an elf taking photos with Santa.

When Nico meets Jade in her elf uniform, he is enchanted. When they meet again at a Rainbow Cove Christmas lunch, he realises Jade is out of his league. She knows what she's doing with her life. She has a life. Following Jade makes stepping off the path easy and, before he knows it, freedom is within Nico's grasp. But if he leaves, he can never come back ...

My Review:

I received a free copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review/opinion.

3 stars — This one just didn’t come together like I expected.  It wasn’t a bad book per se, but it was definitely missing some magic.

I’m not sure I really fell in love with either character.  Nico and Jade are both so…uncertain and wishy-washy with relationships, there just wasn’t a lot that drew me in and had me connecting with them.  They both felt younger than they were…and normally I’m not one to say that, because I know that often early 20s characters aren’t always mature and whatnot.  But this was a life thing in some ways.  On the other hand, I think their emotional growths were stunted by family circumstances, so it’s not unrealistic necessarily.

The thing that truly had me meh was their chemistry.  They felt awkward together, and not the good kind of awkward, but the do they even have chemistry kind of awkward.  Something about their romance just felt forced instead of natural.  It was like all the connecting they were doing was happening off page, and so it ended up feeling like 2 separate stories mashed together in some ways.

I appreciated that Nico wanted to protect his family, but it was hard to watch them take advantage and manipulate him like that.  I loved that he finally let his dad be in his corner, and he got out of his own way.  In that way Jade was really great for him, because she showed him that there were options out there for him.

I loved that Jade was bisexual, and my heart ached for the different things she had to deal with wrt that (parental abandonment, fear of people thinking it’s a “phase”).  I appreciated how hard she was working to balance wanting to travel, and wanting to get her degree.  I found her reluctance to put herself out there with Nico to be slightly more frustrating.

So yeah.  Maybe even 2.5 stars, but it was an easy read, and my gut said 3 so I’m sticking with it.  It was just missing some magic for me.