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
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.
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
Available in Kindle Unlimited
Follow The Tour
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.
Amazon | Bookbub | Contact | Facebook Author Page | Facebook Group Page | Goodreads | Instagram | Newsletter | Twitter | Website
Previous:
Review Tour and Giveaway: Across the Pond by RJ Scott and V.L. Locey
Next:
Release Blitz, Review Tour and Giveaway: Promise by RJ Scott
You may also like
-
5.0
31 DecReview: When A Beta Roars by Eve Langlais
NovellaHow degrading. Stuck babysitting a woman because his alpha said so. As Pride Beta, he has better things to do with his time, like washing his impressive mane, hunting down thugs for fun, and chasing tail—sometimes his own if his lion is feeling playful. But his babysitting job takes an unexpected turn when the woman he’s assigned guard duty over turns out to be his gun-toting mate. Worse she's allergic to cats.
-
09 JunRelease Blitz, Excerpt and Giveaway: Keeping Kellan by Amy Aislin
GiveawayOUT NOW!! Kellan Shelby-Briggs has never shied away from going after what he wants. And what he wants is the important contract that will put his brand new company on the map—and Brant.
-
22 JulRelease Blitz, Review, Excerpt and Giveaway: Don’t Mess With The Ex by DJ Jamison
Giveaway5 STARS!!! For years, I've lived by one simple rule: Don't Mess With The Ex. It was an easy rule to follow when Laurence Kensington III was on the other side of the country. Now that he's shown up out of the blue to tell me we're still married? Not so much.
-
22 MarRelease Blitz / Giveaway: The Chosen Knights by Mary Ting
GiveawayWhen teens go missing in Hawaii, a group of demon-hunters—half human and half angel—disguised as high school students, must leave Crossroads, the place where they reside. In a race against time, they uncover the mystery connecting the missing teens, which dates back to the era of the Knights Templar.
