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A review by elenajohansen
One Bed for Christmas by Jackie Lau
3.0
It sets out to be cute and succeeds admirably, but it takes a lot of shortcuts to culminate a friends-to-lovers scenario that has a backstory over a decade long, which we only see the very beginning of. But the story leans hard on that first meeting and doesn't do much to sketch in what happened in the twelve years between, relying on telling us that Wes has been in love all that time without going into their dynamics.
There's a lot of telling anyway, because this is structured in a dual first-person POV format, so we're treated to both Wes' and Caitlin's internal monologue. There isn't all that much time to really differentiate their voices, but in a novella, I wouldn't expect in-depth character studies. I think the overall tone of the narrative is relatively simplistic because of it, they really do just say how they're feeling (to us as readers, if not always to each other) and it's not terrible, but I guess I wanted a little less transparency and a little more showing through body language, tone of voice, etc.
I got this as part of the complete series bundle, and I like it well enough to keep going, to see if expanding the stories to full-novel-length fixes some of the issues I had with the writing.
There's a lot of telling anyway, because this is structured in a dual first-person POV format, so we're treated to both Wes' and Caitlin's internal monologue. There isn't all that much time to really differentiate their voices, but in a novella, I wouldn't expect in-depth character studies. I think the overall tone of the narrative is relatively simplistic because of it, they really do just say how they're feeling (to us as readers, if not always to each other) and it's not terrible, but I guess I wanted a little less transparency and a little more showing through body language, tone of voice, etc.
I got this as part of the complete series bundle, and I like it well enough to keep going, to see if expanding the stories to full-novel-length fixes some of the issues I had with the writing.