Beth Michele, $0.99, ISBN 979-8215771105
Contemporary Romance, 2023

Beth Michele’s My Favorite Grump is about Charity Weston and Aiden Montgomery meeting each other and opening their Christmas packages for the happy ending.

The story is a standard one: both don’t like Christmas at all like every other character in this kind of stories. That’s basically it. 

Now, I know Christmas shopping can be a huge drag and a strain on one’s nerves, and family gatherings are rarely fun unless you’re the one annoying every other family member that day. However, these characters, especially the heroine, spend the whole story moaning and whining like Santa Claus himself had come down and stole their kidneys, and the whole thing feels so overblown and absurd.

Charity, especially, spends so much of this story acting like there is a hedgehog stuffed up her rear end and she can’t push it out no matter how hard she squeezes those muscles down there. It is one thing to not enjoy the Christmas season, but she cusses and acts like an unpleasant boor to the point that I’m not sure whether the grump in the title refers to her or the hero.

I don’t see what it is about her that will attract Aiden to her for the long haul. If Christmas could make her act like a self-absorbed harridan that doesn’t care how much of a brat she is being, what would she be like when she has more serious problems to deal with? The very possibilities are terrifying.

Anyway, this is a standard story that is just all the common tropes stringed together to give an otherwise familiar cozy read… had the main characters not act like Christmas is the worst thing ever. Seriously, if Christmas shopping were so painful, why not just don’t do it? Go volunteer at some charity or something!

Had these characters not come off as overwrought drama queens so often, I may like this story better, who knows.

Oh, and the story is full of meandering exposition that add little to the overall arc aside from cementing my impression that Charity’s default mode is stanky bitch 24/7.

The crowd is a bit daunting as I enter, and I consider bagging the idea, but can’t quite get my feet to agree. The scent of warm chocolate and sweet waffle cones sift together in the air, and I’m drawn in like a bee to honey. I plant myself at the back of the line, pondering today’s flavor. I had peppermint stick on Monday, deep mocha fudge on Wednesday, and today, I think I’m going with Oreo cookie blast.

While I wait, I scroll through Facebook, but close the app when I see all the holiday posts. Don’t people realize that it’s just another day? The last thing I want to see is all that happiness staring me in the face. Plus, who actually smiles that much? Half the time I wonder if all of it is bullshit.

Seriously, shut up and go help some underprivileged people. God.

Also, the author accidentally comes up with two different moments when the story could have ended on a perfect note, only to drop the ball hard by continuing the characters’ needless and repetitive reiterations of how much they love the other person. Just because the story is told from alternating points of view doesn’t mean that each of them need to bleat about the same “I’m so happy now!” things over and over. This really makes me wonder whether the author really knows what she is doing here, aside from just cooking up a story using all the usual tropes in the same old cliched manner.

Oh well, this one is definitely not a favorite!