Review: "Last Stop on the Winter Wonderland Express" by Rebecca Raisin

Last Stop on the Winter Wonderland Express by Rebecca Raisin
Published August 2025 via Boldwood Books
★★★★

Aubrey is ready for her wedding day and her honeymoon on a slow train through Europe—except her fiancé, as it turns out, isn't. And so she finds herself on a solo honeymoon, seeking her solace in a merry band of solo-traveler misfits.

I'm a sucker for a travel story, and this hit some sweet spots—train travel, Scandinavia (well, for some of it), Christmas markets...it is hard to go wrong with those things. Aubrey is upset about her fiancé's abrupt ghosting, of course, but she's also pretty rational about it: she doesn't know what's next, but she's not looking for an apology and reconciliation; she's level-headed enough to take this as a sign that something wasn't right in the relationship and to go from there.

The surrounding cast of characters is eccentric. Sometimes excessively so—they all tend to talk as though they're in a 1950s movie, or a Mabel Maney book—but I guess they grew on me as time went on. It helped that Raisin leans into the absurd: when Aubrey impulsively tells someone that her husband is dead, her lie takes on a life of its own, with different travelers believing different things (and, of course, each tale getting wilder than the next). I didn't need the lie (it would have been enough of an impediment to the book's primary romance for Aubrey to say, reasonably, "I just got dumped, and I'm not ready for something new"), but if it was there...well, I enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek element.

From a writing perspective, this is middling, but Aubrey's attitude won me over: not just about her ex, but also her overall perspective on travel (lots of it, please, but on a budget) and her honest self-interrogation about what she wants in a relationship...and whether or not that involves a white picket fence. It's nice to see. (Also nice: the fiancé eventually shows up again, and multiple sane adult conversations between various characters take place. I love books with sane adult conversations about relationships.) And, by the end of the book, two of the characters are planning a Camino pilgrimage. Please, please can there be a follow-up book that takes place on the Camino...? Aubrey's sister could walk it and find a lady lover! Or some new character! And I'd get to pretend that I was on the Meseta again...

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