Cruel Winter With You

by Ali Hazelwood

Genres: Romance
Pages: 73
Rating:

Synopsis:

All newly minted pediatrician Jamie Malek wants is to borrow a roasting pan for Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, that requires her to interact with Marc—her best friend’s troublemaking brother, who’s now a tech billionaire. He’s the one who got away. She’s the one who broke his heart. Outside, a howling blizzard. Inside, a crackling fire. Suddenly, being snowbound with the man she never expected to see again might not be such a bad way to spend a winter’s night.

Ali Hazelwood’s Cruel Winter With You is a short seasonal romance, set around Christmas. Marc and Jamie have known each other since they were kids, and Marc’s had a crush on Jamie for about that long — even if he hasn’t always been a perfect angel to her, teasing her throughout their teenage years.

If you examine the scenario, this does come across as quite creepy: he dedicates basically his whole life to becoming rich so he can take care of her and give her anything she wants, he collects photos of her, and sets a photo of her as his lockscreen. He is obsessed. It’s otherwise thin on characterisation as well, which doesn’t help, since most of the page count builds up events where they were both present, rather than developing each as a character.

That said, Jamie doesn’t seem to mind what he’s done, so if you take it at face value it’s pretty cute, and you can really feel the tension and longing. The misunderstanding seems a touch contrived (voice mails aren’t that unobtrusive, in fact phones usually nag you to listen to them quite a bit, in my experience), but you can kind of believe it.

Rating: 2/5