Title: Must Love Christmas
Series: Glasgow Lads on Ice: Book Two
Author: Avery Cockburn
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 320 Pages
Category: Holiday Romance
At a Glance: While Avery Cockburn’s football lads own my heart, and that still remains unchanged and unchallenged, getting to know her curling lads was a lovely gift to myself this holiday season.
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: “I just like being with you, and I don’t want it to stop.”
Garen McLaren is a bit of a mess. But so what? His curling teammates adore his manic energy, and so do the kids he teaches. And nobody does Christmas like Garen. (Snow globes in October? Why not?) He’s vowed to make this year’s holiday the best ever, despite his hot but Scrooge-y new flatmate.
Simon Andreou is a bit of a control freak. The pressures of a new job in a new city are making his head spin. The last thing he needs is an agent of chaos like Garen for a flatmate—much less the memory of their single naked night together.
Just as this odd couple are fumbling toward friendship, a debilitating setback steals Simon’s precious control over life and limb. To be there for Simon, Garen must learn to stop running away when things get tough. And Simon must learn that accepting kindness can be a gift in itself—at Christmas and all year through.
Review: How will a self-described slob with abandonment issues and low self-esteem, and a neat freak with some serious control issues ever find a pathway to love? It’s not easy, but Avery Cockburn sees to it, and just in time for Christmas too.
Garen McLaren spent the first three years of his life in a Russian orphanage with his twin sister, Karen (yes, their adoptive parents named them Garen and Karen McLaren. On purpose), and Cockburn factors that information—not the names but the orphanhood—into the drawing of Garen’s character, as it’s informative to why he is the way he is, which is a sweet, kind, caring, intelligent, lovable extrovert, who has the tendency to be a bit scatter-brained, and he tends to run away when the going gets tough. Garen is also positively obsessed with all things Christmas, which adds an extra layer of guilelessness to his character, which made him all the more endearing to me.
Having just recently lost his flatmate, Luca Riley, to love (see: Throwing Stones for more on that relationship), Garen needs a new roommate with whom to split the expenses and so advertises the opening in an effort to find someone to fill the spot quickly. There are just two conditions, which Garen states in his ad, in his open and honest Garen way: the ideal candidate must accept that Garen is slobby, and they must love Christmas, meaning they won’t mind finding snow globes and holiday knick-knacks decorating the flat at half-Christmas on June 25th.
Of course, what would the romance genre be without tropes like some close proximity, an ultimately happy accident (i.e., the misunderstanding), and a heaping helping of opposites attract? Avery Cockburn incorporates them all into this romance, then adds in a soupçon of resisting the inevitable, some conflict of the living together while lusting after each other variety, as well as a significant health scare to round out the friendship that builds between Garen and his new flatmate, Simon Andreou, before it becomes so much more.
If Garen is the Oscar Madison in this Odd Couple story—messy, disorganized, and perfectly content with it—that would rightly make Simon the Felix Unger type—tidy, fussy, and some might even say intractable. Garen is too easy-going, and Simon isn’t easy-going enough, and somehow they’re going to have to find a way to meet in the middle for their living arrangements to work. Simon needs everything to be just-so, Garen is more into the Ho-Ho-Ho, and the fact that they’re attracted to each other on a purely physical level does nothing but complicate things given Garen’s rule that they cannot, under any circumstances, be roommates-with-benefits . . . even if that can of worms was already opened once, on the day they met. But the stakes are too high to risk things for the sake of sex, so taken off the table, they deal with other problems, such as Garen knowing how to tidy the bathroom when asked, but does he even know how to disinfect it? Oof.
When Simon suffers a relapse of a rare disorder he’s already recovered from once in his lifetime, it tests their mettle, as well as their relationship, in a variety of ways. Watching him and Garen attempt to find some sort of balance and compromise while resisting the impulse to control and hover, or worse, to run away and avoid their problems altogether, was worth the journey to their happy ending.
Must Love Christmas continues the Glasgow Lads on Ice series, a spinoff of my wildly beloved Glasgow Lads, those of the Woodstoun Warriors football team, and a few Warriors even make a crossover appearance in this book. Garen struggling with life both on and off the curling sheet, while Simon confronts his own demons—those of his physical impairments and his recovery—are made more bearable when they finally confront everything as a team of two. It’s when they decide that the fight is worth facing together, each of them learning what it means to meet the other in the middle, that the romantic promise of the holidays is fulfilled.
While Avery Cockburn’s football lads own my heart, and that still remains unchanged and unchallenged, getting to know her curling lads was a lovely gift to myself this holiday season.
You can buy Must Love Christmas here:
[zilla_button url=”https://smarturl.it/MustLoveChristmas” style=”black” size=”large” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon/Kindle Unlimited [/zilla_button]
