Review: Wreck the Halls by Jessica Payseur

Title: Wreck the Halls

Author: Jessica Payseur

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

Length: 46 Pages

Category: Contemporary Holiday Romance

At a Glance: This is a short holiday novella with a HEA(?) that tries to be a love/hate, push/pull kind of storyline. Unfortunately, it just didn’t do it for me.

Reviewed By: Carrie

Blurb: Business has been good at Paul’s Café in Madison, Wisconsin—until a few months before Christmas. When Nick opens Nick’s Restaurant next door, Paul watches his customers leave for cheaper food and an owner who smiles more. With his livelihood at stake, Paul lashes out, trying to drive away Nick’s customers, but Nick won’t go easy, and escalating sabotage threatens to ruin the holidays for both of them.

Paul thinks all he wants for Christmas is to see Nick’s Restaurant go under, but the more he tries to drive Nick away, the less he’s sure he wants him to go. Nick is everything Paul secretly craves, but by the time he realizes Nick is all he really wants for the holidays, he might have ruined any chance for them to get together. And there might not be a present in the world that can fix that.

A story from the Dreamspinner Press 2017 Advent Calendar “Stocking Stuffers.”

Review: Wreck the Halls is a short story that tries to find the niche right there between love and hate. Paul has had a successful restaurant for years; that is, until a similar restaurant with a matching menu opens up right next door. And, that’s where it all begins—vandalism as foreplay. Paul and Nick play a tit-for-tat game for the majority of the book, with escalating “pranks” pulled on each other and their eateries, and it all starts to cost them customers and wait staff.

Paul can be a dichotomy of a character. We see him as a good guy just trying to make a living, and then he will do a one-eighty and vandalize something in Nick’s restaurant. He also craves human interaction; he wishes he had friends, and gets lonely in his apartment above the store, only to be almost cold when Nick announces he is moving in, and you can feel Paul start to pull away from the thought. I really feel like Paul was a cardboard character and that a lot of his edges could have used evening out.

Nick has a reputation for being flighty. He never sticks to anything long term, and that includes businesses. Nick’s café is his third or fourth attempt at owning his own place, only because he gets bored with the concept and moves on. Needling the straight-laced, uptight owner of the restaurant next door may be petty of him, but it sure is fun. Nick is the quintessential little boy who is pulling the pigtails of the girl he likes on the playground to get her attention. Only thing is, I got that this was his motivation, but what Nick was missing was the real hurt he was inflicting. I wanted him to grow up a little, and I’m not sure I bought that this restaurant, or even Paul, were enough to hold him down. This story tries for a HEA, but the mental leaps it would take to get there were just too wide for me to traverse.

The author was reaching for a thread of tension between our two main characters that didn’t seem to materialize. I just never got that they liked, let alone loved, each other at all. To me it seemed there weren’t enough connecting threads to the attraction side of the storyline. It just seemed like two grown men having temper tantrums, and then they decided to date. This is a short holiday novella with a HEA(?) that tries to be a love/hate, push/pull kind of storyline. Unfortunately, it just didn’t do it for me.

You can buy Wreck the Halls here:
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