If You Liked X, Read Y: Christmas Romance Edition

A Shoe Addict’s Christmas = = = Molly of the Mall by Heidi L.M. Jacobs (NeWest Press)Starring Candace Cameron Bure as Noelle (get it?), A Shoe Addict’s Christmas is a straight-up delightful holiday flick. Noelle is a department store worker whose affinity for footwear trumps any whimsy and passion in her life. Enter: a guardian angel who is sent to help Noelle embrace romance and the Christmas spirit by magically sending her back in time to redo certain life choices via, you guessed it, pairs of shoes. Similarly, the aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor in Heidi L.M. Jacobs’s debut novel Molly of the Mall finds herself uninspired—she writes term papers instead of novels and sells shoes at the Largest Mall on Earth in Edmonton—until she seeks the other half of her young life’s own matched pair of shoes. This debut will whisk you away in an exploration of love: for language, for the wrong men (and spoiler: the right one), and for home. 

Holiday in the Wild = = = Few and Far by Allison Kydd (Stonehouse Publishing)The protagonists in the Christmas flick Holiday in the Wild and Allison Kydd’s Few and Far have something in common: after they are jilted by their partners, they travel away to new places that inevitably change their lives. While Holiday in the Wild sees empty-nester and recent divorcée Kate Conrad travelling alone to Africa where she meets an unconventional love, Few and Far‘s Florence Southam travels to the exotic new world of the Saskatchewan Prairies to attend her friend’s wedding and recover from her heartbreak. Finding herself in the town of Cannington, a Victorian settlement that’s trying hard to be society life in England, Florence begins to question her notions about social optics and learns that bucking the conventions of her upbringing might bring her closer to new possibilities.

The Christmas Ornament = = = A Thousand Consolations by Julie Roorda (Brindle & Glass)In The Christmas Ornament, newly widowed Kathy is desperate to avoid any holiday traditions that remind her of her late husband. Cue the Christmas tree shop owner who helps her open up to new love. Similarly in the literary rom-com A Thousand Consolations, widow Paula pours her heart into nothing but her candle-making business until she meets Héctor, a former concert pianist who’s seeking refuge in Toronto, who lights her fire and teaches her to believe in a life in which hope coexists with disappointment. As she begins to see the possibilities of love and romance again, Paula’s biggest romantic complication becomes: will Héctor be allowed to stay in Canada or be sent back to Mexico to meet an unknown fate?* * *For more If You Liked x, Read y, click here.