Review: "Too Cold for Comfort" by Nisha J. Tuli

Too Cold for Comfort by Nisha J. Tuli
Published November 2026 via Forever
★★★

Aadya needs a career-making polar bear photograph. Reid needs enough lodge bookings to ensure another year of operation. They get off on the wrong foot...and once they smooth that out, they have to decide what to do with the fact that one of them is a world traveler and the other has barely left Churchill, Manitoba.

Now. In 2025 I got it in my head to read all the romances I could find with "northern lights" in the title. I'm not quite done (I got distracted by other books), but it's unfortunate for my purposes that Too Cold for Comfort doesn't have a slightly different title, because it would otherwise fit perfectly. Other than the title, these books seem to have a few things in common: City-bred woman, often with a job in travel or media, travels to the remote North and meets a (hot, single) man who is in the tourism industry (like, say, a lodge owner). They have chemistry, but they live incompatibly different lives. What is a girl to do?

Characters: The characters here lean over-the-top. Once Reid calms down a bit and realizes that not every single journalist is out to get him, he's okay, but until that point I wouldn't characterize him as grumpy so much as irrational asshole. Aadya lets it go because he's hot, but...hotness is not grounds for a functional relationship, you know? (It also makes me quite sad that her sister is so eager for her to give up her career dreams to make things work with a guy she barely knows, far away from everyone she does know.) The side characters are mostly quick sketches who lean caricature—one woman is described as "an actual banshee they let out of hell for a week to torment humanity" (loc. 2819*), and in general there's quite a lot of shouting and screaming and bursting into rooms (or sometimes bursting into laughter). It'll work for those who lean Big Emotions and everything right on the surface.

Plot/setting: I love the setting of an ecolodge that does polar bear tours. The tours in this book are on foot rather than in a vehicle, which I didn't know was a thing (it is, apparently, just very expensive). I would have liked a bit of discussion of the differences between the two types of trip (I guess the benefits are safety vs. angle of photograph), and even after quite a bit of searching I don't understand why snow would end the tourist season; my post-Google understanding is that sea ice (and the polar bears going elsewhere) is more the deciding factor. Aadya is also surprisingly relaxed about having really very few opportunities to take the pictures she needs. The lodge Reid runs seems to be based on a real-life lodge, so it makes some sense that it's set up the way it is, but, although this would have made for quite a different book, I did wonder whether hiring a guide privately might have been a better option for her. (As it is, with every other thing that happens she assures Reid that she won't hold it against him and won't put it in her article, including a restaurant scene that is reminiscent of this story but set at a real-world different restaurant that the author swears she's had only good experiences at. Not a choice I loved.)

The romance: It's fast. See "Aadya lets it go because he's hot"—she's horny, they're both pretty people, and I guess that's enough for them. (I am not being fair; they also have some good conversations, especially once Reid lets his guard down a bit.) I did not enjoy the sex, which included some dialogue that make me cringe so hard that I can't bring myself to go into detail, but again, I am a specific reader with...let's say more idiosyncratic preferences than some...and I think this will work well for those who like open-door heat and heroes who occasionally pretend to be cavemen. (Not literally. Just...sometimes there's a vibe.)

So: The setting, yes; the heroine, mostly yes; the side characters, underdeveloped; the hero and the romance, not really my jam. No regrets about picking this one up...except perhaps that I do wish it had somehow worked "northern lights' into the title.

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

* Quotes are from a review copy and may not be final.