A review by lezreadalot
Home for the Holidays by Erin Zak

3.0

“Do your hands ache? Like…when you think about…”
“Everything aches for you.”

This was cute! It was missing a little something for me, because I can't say I was totally convinced by this romance, but it had a lot of elements that I love. Age gap, fake dating, home for the holidays, best friend's mom. All tropes that I really like. But I have to admit, the characters didn't really win me over. 

Iris doesn't have any plans for Christmas this year, so when her best friend  asks her to go home with him and be his fake girlfriend for the holidays, she reluctantly agrees, even though they're both gay. He's nervous about coming out to his family, and thinks that his Type-A mother won't take it well. Meanwhile, Heidi, his mom, had her own lesbian awakening a while ago, and simply hasn't gotten herself to tell her family yet. This one one of those fake dating situations where not a lot of people actually buy into the fake dating lie, so that was a source of amusement by itself. Also, Iris and Heidi have a chance meeting and an intense connection before they realise who the other person is, and they're of course mortified when they figure it out. It leads to a lot of clandestine meetings, a lot of push and pull, everything you'd expect out of a good old forbidden romance. But honestly, the fact that the timeline for this is SO short really did stymie my enjoyment. 80% of the book takes place between December 21st to 25th. There have been books that convinced me that characters have fallen in love in shorter periods of time, but this didn't really manage that? I feel like I can count the number of conversations they actually had on one hand. They have a bunch of intense steamy sex and that was great, but the spark of romance wasn't really there for me. And honestly, I just didn't like either of these women a lot, particularly Heidi.

Spoiler

I wish there had been more acknowledgment of how Heidi mismanaged the situation with Sandy. Not that Sandy wasn't at fault, because she very much was! But it just felt a little weird. It was also a little irritating that the miscommunication between Heidi and Zac was so huge. The person he described was nothing like the Heidi we got to know, and it's baffling to think how he got that idea of her? I don't know, it felt like manufactured conflict.

I did like a lot of the humour and quips, and it's always enjoyable reading a holiday romance with a huge family and a lot of cute Christmas traditions and activities. So that part of it was fun. Especially given the fact that so many other members of the family were queer. Even though I wasn't in love with Iris and Heidi's romance, there were parts that I really enjoyed. And the big dramatic blow up at the end managed to to fun and harrowing in a good way, rather than an annoying way. So I enjoyed this overall! Will definitely check out the author again.