Release Blitz, Review Tour and Giveaway: Hometown Christmas by Garrett Leigh

21 November of 2019 by ButtonsMom2003

Reviewer's Rating: 5

5.0Overall score

Wonderfully British; a beautiful story.

Hometown Christmas By Garrett Leigh

Genre: Contemporary Romance, GLBTQ, MM, Christmas

Released: November 21, 2019

Publisher: Fox Love Press

Length: 40,000 words approx./165 pages

Cover Design: Black Jazz Design

Synopsis

Yani Nicolaou is sworn off love for good. After fleeing a bad break-up in London, the only blood, sweat, and tears he has left are for his gyro stall at the Christmas market. Rebound fling? No thanks. He’s sticking to one-night-stands.

Ex-army vet Gavin Richie has even less capacity for romance. Managing a homeless shelter while recovering from injury keeps him far too busy. So what if he’s often alone? He’s content being single, or so he thinks until a chance meeting lights a spark he can’t ignore.

Yani is the warmth and affection Gavin hadn’t known he was missing. As Christmas lights up the city, their lives entwine in more ways than one. Falling for each other is easy. Holding on is harder, unless a hometown Christmas proves their love can last longer than the festive season.

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Review

Reviewed by ButtonsMom2003

Wonderfully British; a beautiful story.

I love reading books that challenge me in different ways. Hometown Christmas is one of those books. It has a lot of new-to-me British terms/slang and I loved it. I will admit, though, that I’m very happy I read on a device that makes it super easy to look stuff up while I’m reading. While I got the gist of most words as they were used in context during the story, I love being able to really know what a particular term means.

It’s kind of funny, while reading this story I didn’t really think of it so much as a Christmas one. Christmas is there but not until near the end of the book and that was fine with me. The story is more about two men, kind of broken in different ways, coming together and creating a relationship that worked for them.

Gavin is former military, discharged due to a serious injury, and he can’t talk about a lot of his life. Yani is a cook who has his own stall in a market where he sells Greek food. He has OCD and has to fight to keep it from controlling him.

Both Gavin and Yani are a bit gun shy when it comes to relationships. They first get together as a one-off then become friends. Because of his last failed relationship, it takes Yani a bit of time to accept the fact that what he and Gavin have is more than just a fling. Gavin’s infinite patience, and understanding of Yani’s OCD, pays off and Yani finally accepts that he’s in love with Gavin.

One small thing bothered me…unless I totally missed it, we never really learned how Gavin came to be working at the shelter and I would have liked to know a bit more about that. It’s a minor thing, though and not enough for me to ding my rating even a half of a star.

In the Afterword for the book, the author discloses that Gavin (aka Wedge) appeared in two other books (Between Ghosts and Soul to Keep) as a side character and now I must go read them! 😊

♥♥♥♥♥

O Factor: Spicy

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About Author

Garrett Leigh

Garrett Leigh is an award-winning British writer and book designer.

Garrett’s debut novel, Slide, won Best Bisexual Debut at the 2014 Rainbow Book Awards, and her polyamorous novel, Misfits was a finalist in the 2016 LAMBDA awards.

When not writing, Garrett can generally be found procrastinating on Twitter, cooking up a storm, or sitting on her behind doing as little as possible, all the while shouting at her menagerie of children and animals and attempting to tame her unruly and wonderful FOX.

Garrett is also an award winning cover artist, taking the silver medal at the Benjamin Franklin Book Awards in 2016. She designs for various publishing houses and independent authors at blackjazzdesign.com, and co-owns the specialist stock site moonstockphotography.com with renowned LGBTQA+ photographer Dan Burgess.

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