Review: "The Nightmare Before Kissmas" by Sara Raasch

The Nightmare Before Kissmas by Sara Raasch
Published October 2024 via Bramble
★★★

When Christmas meets Halloween...

I picked this up thinking it was YA, and to be perfectly honest it wasn't until I'd finished the book and read a brief interview with the author that I realised it was marketed as a romance novel. It's spicier than your average YA book, but then lines have gotten more and more blurred between YA and NA and adults romance, so... With Coal and Hex in college, this is largely a coming-of-age story; Coal has to figure out how to grow up and distinguish himself from his father (or rather, from Father Christmas), and, well...I think I'm going to carry on mentally treating this as YA.

At any rate, it's a basically cute story. The Red, White & Royal Blue comparison is bollocks, of course, but I guess when a book (an excellent book!) gets that much press, everyone wants it as a comp title. I think I'd have liked a bit more worldbuilding, and in particular an acknowledgement of non-Western holidays—Father Winter this book's Santa talks about expanding Christmas's global reach, but (perhaps to keep him from looking irredeemably bad-guy?) nobody ever explicitly mentions that that probably means he wants to have Christmas overrun things like Eid and Holi. The optics would not be great, would they? Except...I think that's exactly what he's trying to do. Would have liked to see that discussed a bit more directly, because it could have added quite a bit of depth and I'd be side-eyeing the concept less now.

I won't go out of my way to read the next book, but if a future book in the series brings in some holidays I know less about, I'd consider jumping back in.