The Holiday Treatment – Elle Spencer

I’ve not really been in the reading mood this past week – but it’s really unlike me to take as long with a book as I did with this one – despite it being an easy read and not particularly long – I just found there wasn’t really anything that encouraged me to keep reading instead of doing something else.

The first 30-35% of the book moved along quite nicely. We meet Holly who works at the Wifetime network writing a popular Christmas movie series – Evermore. One of the executives at the network is Meredith, whom Holly has a crush on. Holly grew up in a town devoted to Christmas, and subsequently finds an affinity for Hawaii at Christmas. Fate brings Meredith and Holly together in Hawaii.

After this part of the book – I found myself experiencing a whiplash effect more than once, and confused me just as much at times. There is a dream episode that I thought was real – which then lead me to believe that things that are written to have actually happened were dreams, which meant re-reading to ensure I had accurately understood things. The parts of the book where angst and tension are introduced felt like jolts in the storyline and felt contrived.

Once Meredith and Holly are together, we don’t actually get to see much of this – except for some significant moments in their lives, making it too slow burn for my personal tastes.

I liked some of the secondary characters, but some just baffled me. The part of the book where Holly returns to her parents home is very sweet, but could have been shorter and still have been effective in the storyline.

All in this was a book with great potential, that in some places, especially at the beginning, managed to live up to it, but more often than not felt disconnected. If you love holiday romances there is likely to be enough enjoyable things here for you to give this a go.

I received an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.