Under the Mistletoe Collection Review

Hello everyone and welcome back to the blog! Today, I am back with a holiday series review. Amazon Original Stories released a collection of holiday novellas by 5 popular authors. Those authors are Ali Hazelwood, Tessa Bailey, Olivia Dade, Alexandria Bellefleur, and Alexis Daria. So, let's get into it!

Each novella in this collection ranges from 50-75 pages. Cruel Winter With You is the longest of all. Merry Ever After the only one that is duo point of view.

Now below is my ranking from favorite to least favorite:

1. Cruel Winter With You by Ali Hazelwood – 5 stars
2. Merriment and Mayhem by Alexandria Bellefleur – 4 stars
3. Only Santas in the Building by Alexis Daria – 3 stars
4. All By My Elf by Olivia Dade – 3 stars
5. Merry Ever After by Tessa Bailey – 2 stars

I honestly loved this idea from Amazon. These are well known authors putting out a little holiday spirit. Since each is a novella, you could read all of these in one day...literally hours. I've read books by Ali Hazelwood, Alexis Daria, and Tessa Bailey before, so I was super excited to see this kind of line-up. I also thought the plot for each book was really fun and creative.

Cruel Winter With You was by far the best out of the entire collection. As I stated above, it is the longest, but it also has the most character development (especially for a novella). I really liked the backstory we got of the characters and with the small page count nothing felt rushed. I love the best friends brother trope. The pacing was perfect, and I thought Marc was super romantic.

Merriment and Mayhem had the premise I was most excited for. The whole fire fighter thing was so swoon worthy. It was really creative how these characters were brought together. The only thing I didn't like was how fast the main female character was willing to stay in Seattle after spending time with Griffin. But again, there isn't a lot of pages to make the necessary development, so take that with a grain of salt. I always love reading a book with the trope, he falls first.

Only Santas in the Building was super cute. I thought this one was super romantic. This was really creative in my opinion, and I liked the backstory between the main characters. This didn't feel rushed. Of the reviews I've seen so far, this one was hit or miss with a lot of people. It was a hit for me. Again, another super romantic male main character. Theo was definitely falling hard first.

All By My Elf was good but not very noteworthy. I give it points for creativity, but the dialogue between the main characters was a little weird. Especially during the spicy scene. Overall, still cute and quirky.

Merry Ever After was my least favorite. The plot was creative, in terms of, I've never read anything like it before. But I didn't sense a lot of chemistry between the main characters. The male main character felt pushy, and to be honest the female main character didn't seem into him at all. It was weird.

I thought it was interesting how 2 out of the 5 books gave the female main characters the same name (Evie). I'm assuming that wasn't on purpose, but out of all the names in the world I feel like in this collection their shouldn't have been any repeats. I don't know why but that just really bothered me.

Overall, these are really fast and fun reads for the holiday season. I would highly recommend checking them out. They are all available on Kindle Unlimited!

Alright folks, that's all I have for today! Come back next Wednesday for another blog post! As always, thank you for reading :)