Review: "The Christmas Swap" by Talia Samuels

The Christmas Swap by Talia Samuels
Published October 2023 via Alcove
★★

It's a classic setup: Ben needs a date for the holidays, and Margot needs a place to go. In public, they'll be together; behind closed doors, it's strictly platonic. But there's a twist...in the form of Ben's sister, Ellie. Who is a lesbian. As is Margot. And when sparks inevitably fly, it's not between the "happy couple".

On the whole this is cute and fluffy, poised to be a fun winter read. There's a fair amount going on—Margot is still reeling from the fallout of her previous (toxic) relationship, Ellie is trying to prove to her parents that she's moved on from her partying days to string lights and picnics, and Ben is sufficiently ashamed of being chronically single that, well, Margot is there for Christmas. I'm on record many times saying that I don't love Evil Villains Who Are Evil, but I do appreciate that the other characters understand, often better than Margot does, why it might be hard to fully disentangle from her ex. And I love the occasional silly plays with language: I'm feeling very strange about the strange thing with the strange stranger. (loc. 187*)

Where I get stuck, though, is with this: When Margot and Ellie get together, it's with a thoughtlessness so extreme that it borders on cruelty. They absolutely don't mean any cruelty—they're both nice women with a side of pumpkin spice. But there's never a point at which they consider that sneaking around to date each other, when Margot is there to play-act as Ben's girlfriend, might hurt anyone. Nobody suggests that they hold off on their attraction for a couple of weeks, or discusses how it's going to feel to Ben to have to either 1) come clean to his family about hiring a girlfriend for a week or 2) not come clean but instead pretend, a month or two down the line, that it's totally fine that his ex-girlfriend is now dating his sister. Margot is looking forward to telling Ben everything, but only so that she has someone to giggle and gossip with, because she's now viewing Ben as her best friend. (There's actually something quite intriguing in Margot's decision to view a relative stranger-come-fake-boyfriend as her best friend—it might be reflective of the shakiness of her other friendships and perhaps the damage that's been done to her sense of what a relationship should be, thanks to the toxic ex. Or it might be something else! In any case, it would have been interesting to see that explored in more detail.)

So I wanted to cheer Margot and Ellie on, but in the end I was mostly just sad for Ben. It works out, of course (not a spoiler! It's a romance novel, so of course it works out—and you can see the shape of things working out coming from quite some distance), but I spent most of the second half of the book trying to figure out what would have made the whole thing sit better with me. Telling Ben earlier, perhaps, or postponing the real dating until the fake dating was over, or at the very least Margot and Ellie acknowledging that the whole thing had the potential to get very messy very quickly...or Ben not so quickly and unreservedly getting over his hurt and humiliation, or them trying to tell Ben, or even the characters all being ten years younger and just a bit more...understandably thoughtless. Again: as characters, they aren't written as bad people, but...with a lesbian romance novel, I don't want my overarching takeaway to be sympathy for the straight, cisgender, "best friend" of a man.

I was very much looking forward to this—it wasn't the book for me, but I hope I'm the outlier here and that it'll work better for other readers.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotations are from an ARC and may not be final.