The Nightmare Before Kissmas: A Royals and Romance Novel (Royals and Romance, 1)

This book was so fun! The concept for this story is so unique and I had the best time reading it. Coal is the prince of Christmas doomed to continually make mistakes, but he wants to be better. He meets a mysterious stranger one night in a bar who changes his outlook on life. They kiss and his stranger disappears until a year later when he shows up on Coal’s front door. Turns out the mysterious stranger is the prince of Halloween. Will these two be able to make a forbidden love actually work or will everything fall apart?

4.75/5 I'd recommend this to fans of Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, there are a lot of similarities in the setup and tone, but in this case the fantasy element is that Holidays have real magic and are run by royal families rather than the US having a female president. 😅 I was expecting a fun and silly romance, which was definitely delivered, but was pleasantly surprised by the political plots and world building for how the holidays worked. There are several spicy scenes and a lot of sexual tension, arguably a case of insta-love and insta-lust, but the scenes are not particularly graphic. The insta-elements were done pretty well, considering those are tropes I usually don't like. Part of the book takes place in the normal world away from the holiday magic, but most of the book takes place in Christmas land. The entire book is told from the Christmas Prince's perspective. I did wish we got more time exploring how Halloween worked, and it would have been cool to have the prince of Halloween's perspective, but that's a small criticism. If you're the kind of person who is a little annoyed to see the Halloween decorations in stores come down before Halloween is even over and frustrated with how commodified the Christmas season has become, you might get a little smug satisfaction from this book as well. Content Warnings: Moderate: Cursing, Emotional abuse, Sexual content, Grief, and Abandonment Minor: Death, Vomit, Car accident, Death of parent, and Alcohol

Honestly first half didn't really seem like we were going anywhere. But around the midway point I really started to resonate with Coal