Eliza Evans

Steve Thomas: Eliza, welcome to the podcast.

Eliza Evans: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Steve Thomas: Before we get into the book, what’s been your experience with libraries as a reader and now the different relationship you might have with libraries as an author?

Eliza Evans: Oh, I’ve always loved libraries. Obviously, you know, book lover means library lover a lot of times, right? So I spent a lot of time there as a kid. Actually, my mom would take me. I had a library card from a very young age, and it was my happy place. I was pretty shy as a child, believe it or not. Now I talk a lot, but I was shy and I loved books. You know, you could just lose yourself in a book, and it wasn’t intimidating or you didn’t have to talk or so it was just like immersing yourself in a story world. I’ve loved that since I was very young.

So I’ve always been pretty active with libraries. And when I had kids, we spent a lot of time at the library, and you know, now they have so many things more than when I was a kid, so many activities, interactive readings, and just a lot going on, so my kids grew up in the library as well. So very important to me and very important just to society, I think.

Steve Thomas: Yes. Yeah. And do you do a lot of events at libraries now as an author?

Eliza Evans: I do. Yes. Anytime a library asks me, I really try to make it work because I just enjoy it so much. And you know, the people who are going to show up to a library event love books. I love spending time with people who love books.

Steve Thomas: I guess occasionally at a bookstore, you’re just going to get an occasional person who was just passing through and maybe not as much of a book lover.

Eliza Evans: Yep, but people are involved in the library because they love books typically. So it’s really fun to go and meet with readers in that space.

Steve Thomas: Well, I wanted to have you on the show because I occasionally have authors on and I try to kind of hit different genres all over the place and hit all kinds of things. And I realized I hadn’t had a nice little holiday story before. And then I was drawn to the fun title of your book, The Christmas Cookie Wars. So, can you tell listeners what the story is about and what was the inspiration of the concept for you?

Eliza Evans: Sure. So the story is about a widowed mom who lost her husband. So she has twin 10 year old boys. And when her boys were four, she lost her husband. And so she’s doing everything she can to keep the Christmas magic alive for her kids, even though you know what happens as kids get older, they start to kind of outgrow some of those traditions, and that’s hard for her because it’s so much a part of her memories of her husband and their family. So, the school has a cookie committee, they call it the cookie committee, and it’s like a fundraising, they do a lot of fundraising throughout the year, but she finds out that that committee has been disbanded because of some drama at the school. And so she decides, even though she’s not a baker at all, she decides she’s going to take over the cookie committee. She’s a fashionista. She owns a boutique, so this is not her wheelhouse at all, but she knows if she doesn’t, those traditions, those events that the cookie committee planned are going to go away.

And so she jumps in and ends up having to work with the principal, but then finds herself wrapped up in a big cookie competition, going head to head with the boy’s principal, Jonathan Braxton. And that kind of creates a lot of fun competition and banter and sets the stage for some good conflict through the story for Melody and Jonathan.

Steve Thomas: Yes, and since it’s a romance, you can guess what that might turn into later, but…

Eliza Evans: Yes, I’ll let you fill in the blanks.

Steve Thomas: But yeah, that struggle to keep that holiday spirit alive because Melody and her husband had all been like really into Christmas and really dressing up and really getting into it, and so it is important for her to do that. How did you approach that part of the story of, I mean, it’s been six years, so she’s grieving still, but the pain is not quite as much there, but how do you talk about death, I guess, while also keeping it light and romantic at the same time?

Eliza Evans: Sure, sure. And that’s one reason I decided to make the death in the past, in the pretty distant past. You know, grief is such a process and you never get over missing the person, but you do come to find comfort and joy even in the memories, I think. And so that’s kind of where she’s at, but she’s also realizing that her kids are getting older and she’s made her entire life about her kids, kind of. So her whole world revolves around the boys, and she’s starting to realize that that is not going to be a long term happy solution for her life.

So she’s wanting to hold on to everything, and at the same time, she’s approaching this place in life where she’s ready to move on as well. And so, as far as the sadness or the heaviness of grief, I think a lot of us are dealing with that at Christmas time. A lot of us are missing someone who used to sit at the table with us. And so I really just tried to focus on the happiness of her memories and the happiness of their memories as a family and that her and the boys talk about how funny he was or how those memories were funny and joyful and they can talk about that now, so I feel like that helped balance out. I didn’t want her to still be in the middle of her grief.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. I have a 13 and a 17 year old. I know you have two boys in high school, now college. Was it easy, I guess, to bring those emotions to the page of feeling the pain of the kids moving on?

Eliza Evans: For sure. We just dropped our first son off at college a couple of weeks ago. The whole last year, even, you know, I wanted them to go see Santa last Christmas. I’m like, we can’t let go of this yet. You know, all those things that we just always enjoyed doing with the kids. Yeah. So tons of inspiration that way for the book really. I mean, even from the two boys, the really mischievous boys who are well meaning but get into trouble. That also is real life inspiration. I had a lot of material to work with in that regard for sure. Yes.

Steve Thomas: Most holiday books are released in the months coming up to the holidays, but your writing schedule maybe doesn’t necessarily line up with that. Is there a way in particular that you get yourself sort of in the Christmas spirit if you’re at a Memorial Day barbecue but you have a deadline next week or something? How do you get yourself in that spirit?

Eliza Evans: I listen to a lot of Christmas music. Sometimes I’ll watch Christmas movies even. Usually I’m writing the book during the summer, or starting spring and going through the summer. And so it is definitely a challenge to create the ambiance for myself. So yes, Christmas music will be playing. I always have some Christmas decorations out in my office, on my desk, and once in a while I have even, there’s that Hallmark Christmas in July, never a bad thing to have on the background when you’re writing, you know, just to kind of find that spirit of Christmas in the middle of the 80 degree weather.

Steve Thomas: Right, and speaking of that, if they ever optioned your books for a Hallmark kind of movie, do you have like dream casting that you would want for your main characters?

Eliza Evans: Oh my goodness. Dream casting. I have never thought about that. I don’t think I have any one top of mind that I would you know think of right away. It would be hard for me, I think, a little bit because I have such a picture of what they look like, and I’m not one who goes and like picks out an actor as inspiration for my character. Some people do that. Some authors do that. I don’t typically, I kind of come up with the physical description. I look at a lot of pictures of random people, not actors necessarily, and then just kind of create, kind of sketch it out in my own mind, if that makes sense? So I don’t know how that would go if I felt like, “Oh, it’s that person…” you know, and I don’t even know if I’d get any input on that. When you sign those options, it’s like, “We’re going to do whatever we want.” And that’s great. You know, they should, because film is different than books.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I think it was Hemingway, maybe, I think they said something like, “My book is still on the shelf over there. I throw my book at them, they throw money at me, and that’s the end of the process.”

Eliza Evans: Yeah. Yes, yes. I think it would be, when you’ve spent as much time with a character as the author does, and you’re picturing them a certain way, Yeah, I’m not sure. Maybe I should just look at actors for inspiration.

Steve Thomas: But they’re inside your head too. And so just nobody’s ever going to be exactly the character that you think, right?

Eliza Evans: And they take on such a life of their own in a lot of ways too. So that would be a really interesting process. I think it would actually be fun to be involved in a film project like that. So maybe someday.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. But one, I actually was going to ask about that before because it’s interesting that you have that, like in your mind, you know what these characters look like, you know all that, but I think you do a good job in the writing that you don’t overwhelm the reader with physical description, because you’ll occasionally read, this is very cheesy, but you know, “As he pass the mirror, he noticed his square jaw…”, like, okay, I got it. You’re describing the character, but you do enough that you get a picture, but you let the reader kind of fill in…

Eliza Evans: Yeah, I like to keep it pretty general in the character descriptions just because you know there is a piece of reading that’s imaginative and I want them to kind of be free to create what they think the character looks like in their own head, too. So you don’t want to outline every single detail of their face, and that just gets cumbersome and tiring, too, because you know, then it loses the action and stuff, too, if you spend too much time on that description.

Steve Thomas: So the Christmas Cookie Wars and your previous rom com, The Christmas Cafe, are both centered around food and holiday cheer. Number one, do you have a favorite holiday dish yourself? And also what is it about the combination of food and the holidays that attracts you as a writer, to put those two things together?

Eliza Evans: Yeah, I think there’s just a lot of our memories for Christmas for most people are tied to food and the gathering around the table. So, you know, in my family, we have a huge Christmas gathering. It’s always been family, but also random neighbors or friends or anybody that doesn’t have a place to go, and we spend months planning the menu and usually for us the traditional Christmas dinner, turkey and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and all those old school dishes that we like.

But I also have always loved Christmas baking, and that’s a tradition in my family. I would get together with my mom and my aunts and my cousins and we all do a lot of like cookie decorating and baking. And so that’s a big part of the holidays for us. And you look forward to those dishes because you typically only make them once a year, especially the cookies and stuff like that.

My favorite Christmas cookie is a white chocolate dipped ginger snap. So that’s one of my favorites that I like to make, but we do the sugar cookies, the cutout cookies, we all decorate them and, you know, the food is good, but it’s the togetherness, I think, the gathering of people that’s more fun. And it usually revolves around food.

Steve Thomas: Well, for this new book you worked with Amanda Cupcake to come up with a very special cookie. First, can you tell listeners who Amanda is, how you started collaborating with her on this kind of thing, and then finally about the cookie itself?

Eliza Evans: Sure. So, Amanda Cupcake is a local baker. She’s kind of a local celebrity where I live. I call her a cupcake designer. She does have a background in fashion design and then totally pivoted in her career and started making cupcakes and just found this huge following. She’s so creative with her cupcakes. I mean, like, I love to bake, but I’m not a professional, let’s be honest, like, I do okay, but I’m not at that level, and so with the Christmas Cafe, my book last year, I really wanted, like, the most epic Christmas dessert so I had to find a local baker and I just started looking around and right away I found her and I was like, this is perfect, because she created the most epic Christmas cake for that book, and then we went on a book cake tour. We called it our Book Cake Tour last fall. And we went around to different venues and readers loved it. They loved having that component of the baked goods along with the book. It was just a really fun dynamic. We love working together. We’re both creatives, and we just had such a good time.

So we’re like, let’s collaborate again for the cookies, and so I just told her some flavors I was thinking about, those nostalgic Christmas flavors, cinnamon, eggnog, whatever. So we came up with, well, I should say she came up with the Eggnog Creme Brulé Sparkle Doodle Cookie, so it’s hitting all those good notes of the eggnog and the cinnamon and who doesn’t love a sparkle doodle. It’s got edible glitter on it because my character in the book, she’s trying to create an epic Christmas cookie to win this competition. She knows she might not be there on taste because she’s not a great baker, but she’s a fashion designer, right? And so she’s like, I want to make the prettiest cookie. And so this sparkle doodle cookie we created, it involves a blowtorch. You have to caramelize the sugar on top and make it all pretty and then edible glitter. We had a lot of fun with that and it’s just, it was the perfect cookie for Melody to make in the book.

Steve Thomas: And did you get to make some yourself?

Eliza Evans: Yes, we did. We had to test the recipe. I mean, you have to test the recipe, you know, and she even let me do the blowtorch, it was really fun.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I saw some cute pictures of you guys on Instagram putting that stuff together.

Eliza Evans: Yes, we do. We have a really fun time. And you know, I love working with someone else on things like that, just because writing is so solitary. Writing a book is a lot of alone time, and I’m a people person. I like to be with people. And so it’s just really fun. Also, because when we did the events, I got to talk to so many readers that it was just really well received and we had such a good time.

Steve Thomas: That’s great. So do you think you’ll want to continue collaborating with her in the future?

Eliza Evans: I’m hoping to. I’m working on a book right now that’s called the Christmas Wedding Cake. So yes, so hoping that one can be released next year and would definitely be open to working with her on a for that and a couple of fun events.

Steve Thomas: And do you include the recipe in the book?

Eliza Evans: Yes, the recipe is in the book for everyone to use if they so choose, if they’re brave enough to try it.

Steve Thomas: You got your master’s degree in journalism. Has that mindset of the journalist, does that shape your approach to how you do storytelling?

Eliza Evans: It does a lot. So it’s really interesting when I decided I wanted to write fiction, it was after my first son was born and I was like, “I’m going to write a novel!” cause you know, I wanted to be home more, but I had this journalistic background. I was a PR writer pretty much for my career at that point so I started sending out manuscripts to editors and was getting rejections coming in, whatever.

So this one editor, I was so thankful to her because she rejected me, but she also gave me some really important advice because she said, you know, a lot of them are just form rejections, right? But she took the time to write me back. She said, “You are a really good writer. Like, I can tell you know what you’re doing. The sentence structure is wonderful. It flows well. You know how to write,” but she said, “there’s no emotion in your story.” Well, of course not, cause I was trained as a journalist. I was trained with who, what, when, where, why, how, and that made me totally pivot. I just started studying emotion and how people do that. And so in a lot of ways, the journalistic background helped me build a foundation for at least putting words together, right? That was an important piece, and it hindered me in that I had to emotionally detach from everything I was writing about in that program, so I had to really focus on that emotion piece.

The other thing that the journalism masters helped me with was research. I love research and I love interviewing people. I really was well trained for that. I always, always find characters. When I have a character with a job, I always find someone who does that job so that I can sit down with them and talk with them, even Amanda Cupcake, she was a fashion designer. So I got to talk to her about Melody and what that looks like and the ins and outs of that, and that doesn’t mean I get everything right, completely right, cause I’ve never done that job, but it does help me to understand a little bit more that person, their background. When I wrote the Christmas Cafe, there’s a goat farmer in it, so I went to a local goat farm and spent a day with them, and they taught me so much about goats and I had so much fun. I love goats, but that’s the piece that the journalism really helped me with too, is just knowing how important research is. You want to get it right. You want it to be as relatable and accurate as you can make it, even though it’s fiction still. And so that really helped prepare me for that piece of the writing.

Steve Thomas: Was there any other research people in particular that you talked to for this book or was it just that fashion design mindset for this one?

Eliza Evans: It was mainly just the fashion design. I know a lot of people in education, of course. So from Jonathan Braxton, as the principal, his point of view, I did talk with a principal and some teachers just to get that inside look at a school, how an elementary school functions and all that kind of stuff too. So yeah, so there was that side of it.

Steve Thomas: You didn’t have to interview any nasty gossipy people for Charlene?

Eliza Evans: No, I’ve known plenty of them. We’ve all run into those people before!

Steve Thomas: Is there any holiday tradition in particular that’s one of your favorites that you get to incorporate in this book or any of the other books that sort of a thing that you enjoy in particular that you got to do here? Like the baking is one I know you mentioned, but anything else that is fun for you and your family in particular that you’ve gotten to in integrate into your books?

Eliza Evans: Oh yeah. I mean, I feel like a lot of it, like I said, is inspired by what we do. One is going to look at the Christmas lights. We always do that, and the scene with Jonathan and Melody going to the forest of lights, that was… We used to have a place where we would go like that and walk around outside in the snow with all the fairy lights. And they just did such a good job decorating all the trees and with the different colors. So that’s always been definitely something that we do. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and of course, it’s a nice little romantic…,

Eliza Evans: It lends itself to romance, but yeah, they do that whole light tour where they get their PJs on, they go with the hot cocoa in the car, and they’re all in one car. We’ve done that many times with our family.

Steve Thomas: So I usually wrap up my interviews with authors with two questions. The first one is, do you remember what your first favorite book was when you were a kid? Can you remember the first time you were enamored by a book?

Eliza Evans: The first, oh man, I have to go way back for that one. It was probably a Nancy Drew book. I fell in love with that series just because she was such a strong female character solving these mysteries. I was checking every one of those out of the library. So it was probably that. I always loved books, and I loved picture books. And my parents read to us all the time, so that was always part of it, but when I started actually getting immersed into, it was probably the mystery and Nancy Drew that I was like, “I want to be her!” and just so much a part of the story because there was mystery, but also, she was just this strong female character that I connected with and was like, fascinated by.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. I didn’t read a lot of them, but my wife read, she has like a collection of all of them still, and she points out that she’s the one saving Ned or whatever her boyfriend’s name. She’s saving him from things.

Eliza Evans: I loved that because it kind of flipped the fairy tale on its head a little bit, which you didn’t see a lot back then either. I think that’s why I loved it so much. I was like, “She’s so cool!”

Steve Thomas: Would you ever want to write a mystery? Are you happy in romance?

Eliza Evans: Not I think mysteries are very difficult to do. I think you have to have a good mind for creating a mystery. I think of plots in every genre. I have so many ideas but I always have to kind of rein myself in and my publisher and agent have to rein me in a little bit too. It would maybe be fun for me to try someday just on my own because I write some things that will never be published. I don’t expect everything I write to be publishable, maybe self-published. But, yeah, I think it would be fun to try it. I don’t know how it would go. So it would be kind of an unknown.

Steve Thomas: Mm hmm, because mysteries are kind of like puzzles, and you have to know what the end is.

Eliza Evans: Yes. Yeah. And you have to have all those breadcrumbs throughout without giving away too much. It’s that balance, right? I’ve read a lot of them, so I probably, you know, it would be fun to try it someday. If I have time ever in my schedule.

Steve Thomas: Between writing other books.

Eliza Evans: Right, right.

Steve Thomas: And then the last question what’s the latest book that you’ve read that you’ve loved?

Eliza Evans: Oh boy, let’s see. So I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs lately. I just finished Between Two Kingdoms. And the author name is escaping me right now, but I really, really enjoyed that. That was a powerful, you know, not a light read, I will say, not a light read, but very good, very good. I’m kind of on a memoir kick because I’m working on a memoir too. So I’m writing a little bit of nonfiction, and again, who knows if it’s publishable? I don’t know. So I’ve been reading quite a few in that genre lately. The Glass Castle, things like that. I love the memoirs that are story-focused. It feels like a novel almost as you read it.

And I try to read the kind of thing that I’m writing. It helps you kind of with inspiration and seeing what other people are doing and how they’re doing it well.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Is there a Christmas book you read recently? Like, something you remember that you were reading when you were writing Christmas Cookie Wars that you remember was sort of inspirational?

Eliza Evans: Oh my goodness, I read so many. Jenny Bayliss is one I read a lot. She writes a lot of Christmas, and I think that those are the last ones that I read. Yep. Last summer when I was working on mine, I was reading Jenny Bayliss.

Steve Thomas: When you start, when you start to get the next one ready…

Eliza Evans: I’ll be probably making my Christmas reads stack. Yes, for the spring when everyone else is reading other stuff, I’m reading the Christmas books.

Steve Thomas: And what was the name of the next book did you say it was going to be?

Eliza Evans: The Christmas Wedding Cake.

Steve Thomas: Christmas Wedding Cake, that’s right, okay. Well, readers can look forward to that after they read The Christmas Cookie Wars, and if you haven’t already read the previous book, read that as well.

I love your style too, because it’s very storytelling ish. It’s not just strict, objective third person telling the story. It’s almost an emotional reaction sometimes, like you even put one, like, “insert winky emoji here”, or something like that, in parentheses after somebody said something.

Eliza Evans: Yes, I try to write really close POV. We call it POV, point of view, almost like you’re in the character’s head is what I try to write. That’s what I enjoy reading. I feel like it helps me connect with the characters when you have that close point of view. So that’s what I strive for.

Steve Thomas: Well, you’re successful.

Eliza Evans: Thank you. I’m glad. Glad to hear that.

Steve Thomas: Eliza, thank you for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it. And I hope the listeners catch the Christmas Cookie Wars, and they can imagine their own casting.

Eliza Evans: I’d be curious if anyone has suggestions, I’d love to hear ’em.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, send them along. Go to her website.

Eliza Evans: Elizaevansbooks.com is my website.

Steve Thomas: Right. Well thank you so much for talking to me.

Eliza Evans: Yes. Thank you for having me.

***

Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome back to another episode of The Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk, the Executive Director of Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat, a librarian working at Novelist.

Rebecca Vnuk: In this episode, we’re going to be chatting about read alikes for The Christmas Cookie Wars by Eliza Evans. I know that this episode is due to come out in December, and we are talking about in September. And I don’t know, I think Yaika and I are probably geographically close enough that she is as warm as I am right now.

It’s like 90 degrees in September, humid. And that makes me remember when I used to do book roundup articles for Library Journal, I started doing all of the Christmas and holiday ones and I would get this giant box of books in August. And I’d be like, “Oh, you gotta be kidding me. I’m not prepared. I’m not ready!”

Yaika Sabat: “I’m not mentally there right now!”

Rebecca Vnuk: But there’s something, and that was like, gosh, you know, 15, 20 years ago that I used to do that. There’s something very enduring about holiday titles. I think there is a certain kind of reader that gravitates towards those because they are fun. Like, a lot of the fun things about the holidays are very appealing. It’s why people start shopping for Halloween stuff in August, right? It’s why we see the Christmas stuff appearing right after the back to school stuff goes away, right?

Yaika Sabat: Yeah, I’m like, “What’s happening right now?”

Rebecca Vnuk: “Where are we? What time of year is it? I don’t even know anymore!” But there is a long standing and enduring appeal for holiday books. People really enjoy them. I think that a lot of it is escapism reading as well. They tend to be sometimes romances, not necessarily always, but they’ve got romantic elements or they’re relationship fiction or it’s family cozy type stuff. Although you also do see a lot of holiday mysteries, we get a lot of that.

So when I was looking for holiday themed books in the Library Reads archive, I came across a couple of books that I thought would fit as a good read alike match for The Christmas Cookie Wars. So Christmas Cookie Wars, we’ve got this small town, we’ve got a grumpy sunshine, we’ve got the widowed mom who is questioning the point of Christmas. So I tried to find some romantic Christmas themed holiday books. So I found In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren, and that one came out in 2020, and the Library Reads blurb on that comes from Michelle Magnotta in the Greenburgh Public Library, New York. “May and Andrew’s family always vacation together at Christmas. This year is no different, except May keeps experiencing the same days over and over, a la Groundhog Day. Can she get out of the loop long enough to tell Andrew she’s in love with him? Christina Lauren doesn’t disappoint.” So I thought that would be a really, you know, it’s kind of fun, a little bit lighthearted.

Then the next one I chose was Royal Holiday by Jasmine Guillory. That one came out in 2019, and we love a Jasmine Guillory book. She was one of our first authors to hit in our Hall of Fame and every single book she’s had since comes up in our Hall of Fame. She’s got that secret sauce magic formula. So we love a Jasmine Guillory. “This one is an irresistible Christmas fantasy about a woman of a certain age who falls for the Queen of England’s private secretary on a visit to the UK. Guillory describes Britain so well, and it was so wonderful to read a popular romance novel starring an older protagonist,” and that comes from Megan Sanks at the Glenview Public Library.

So, I thought, you know, some just nice holiday romances can’t be beat. Again, easy enough to find in our database. I literally, I think I first searched for Christmas, which brought up a whole bunch of stuff. And then I tried to broaden it to holiday and see what would come up. So very easy to find. And I thought those would be two good ones to point out. So Yaika, what do you think are some good readalikes for that?

Yaika Sabat: Well, you know, looking at The Christmas Cookie Wars, like you said, it’s got the grumpy sunshine, the enemies to lovers, but it’s also heartwarming, feel-good. It’s all about a mom who’s trying to bring the Christmas spirit back to her kids. So it’s very much that sweet heartwarming element.

But it also gives me big Hallmark Christmas movie vibes. So I was looking, and as I was searching, I came across The Christmas Wager by Holly Cassidy from 2023, and this one also gives me huge Hallmark vibes because it is all about an LA real estate developer, you know, big city businesswoman, Bella Ross, who comes to this sleepy mountain town…

Rebecca Vnuk: Gotta have a sleepy small town!

Yaika Sabat: It’s called Maple Falls. You know she goes there to try and acquire the local Christmas shop that is failing which will help her get that big promotion. So she’s very determined, nothing can get her away, except the owner of the Christmas shop has a very stubborn grandson. And so what ends up happening is that they decide they’re going to have to compete in the town’s holiday games. So it very much has that same competition element of Christmas Cookie Wars.

Rebecca Vnuk: Absolutely! That’s a perfect read alike. Yeah.

Yaika Sabat: Yeah. And as the competition gets more intense, so do the feelings. So I think it’s a very good match. This doesn’t have the kid’s angle, but so much else is, I think, a great pick for a read alike.

And then I wanted to recommend Season of Love by Helena Greer, which is from 2022. Again, very Hallmark elements. It follows Miriam Blum who inherits her great aunt’s Jewish-run Christmas tree farm, which is quite interesting, right? And so while she is sitting shiva, she’s trying to avoid parents she doesn’t want to talk to, but she’s got a goal to sort of save this business from going under, which involves working with the grumpy manager, Noelle. The manager obviously doesn’t want this outsider there until other feelings start to develop. And so it is a holiday romance, but it also along with sort of the Christmas element has Jewish representation, and it is a queer romance. It is, you know, two women sort of falling in love despite their different personalities.

Rebecca Vnuk: Nice.

Yaika Sabat: The last one is Love You A Latka by Amanda Elliott. This is definitely another grumpy sunshine book, but it’s also fake relationship, which are two very popular tropes with Jewish representation. And so the description is talking about snow is falling, holiday lights are twinkling, and Abby is angry because she has a very annoying customer who comes into her cafe every morning with this, like, very happy, positive attitude and it just grates on her nerves and she is the only Jewish person on the tourism board of her Vermont town, and she’s sort of having to deal with the Hanukkah festival they’re trying to start. So she is trying to get support in that, and in that process, she discovered she was actually wrong about being the only Jewish person within 100 miles because Seth, her annoying customer, is in fact the other Jewish person within 100 miles. So it is feel good. It’s romantic. You get sort of the charm of the season but with a little different representation and also the grumpy sunshine with the guy being the sunshine and the woman being, which is not normally what you see.

Rebecca Vnuk: That sounds the most appealing about the whole thing. I mean, a lot of it sounds appealing, but as soon as you’re like, “she” and I’m like, “Wait, what?” I’m digging that!

Yaika Sabat: And I have to say, like, I kind of love a woman who works in food service who’s just like, “I am not in the mood for this super happy person.” Anyone who’s ever worked in food service or customer service can slightly relate to that, especially during the holidays.

And I will say I love themes in Novelist and for romance searching, it’s so helpful because romance is a genre that is so rich with themes, or some people call them tropes, and so if you’re reading a book and you’re like, “I just love the tension of enemies to lovers,” it’s so easy to go into Novelist and search for that theme and find just a huge list of books that you can choose from. So I had a lot of fun going through this because I do think holiday romances are a good time. And I think they can hopefully bring you just a little bit of charm while you’re reading this season.

Rebecca Vnuk: Excellent. Excellent. Well, all right. Thank you so much for hanging out with us at the Circ Desk and we will check you out next time.