A Cat Cafe Christmas ARC Review
Well, my grand plans for spending most of my vacation elbow deep in the mostly neglected ARCs on my kindle, pretty much went sideways. But fear not I am here once again with (yet another) advance review for a 2022 holiday romance! I was totally pulled in by the very cute illustrated cover, and being a cat owner, I was ALL kinds of excited to get early reader access to Codi Gary’s A Cat Cafe Christmas.
As always a huge thank you to my pals at NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for the eARC thoughts below are my own, enjoy!
I’m starting to get a little worried that maybe holiday romances really aren’t for me? Which truly is wild because, my god do I love a Hallmark fever-dream of a made for TV holiday romance. But much like There’s Something About Merry, I just found myself growing more and more dismayed as I worked my way through this one.
Let’s start with what I did like: the cats! Man I wish we had more time with them? Each chapter gave us little snippets of who these adoptable cats were, and even little Chaos was truly the star here, I could have spent and loved my time with them rather than the leads who, I just STRUGGLED to root for the entire read.
First, we have Dr. Kara Ingalls, a vet running from a terrible breakup and nationally tracked embezzlement scandal the last man she dated unwittingly made her an accessory of. She’s guilty of being too trusting y’all! She was responsible for the largest data breach in history along with hundreds of thousands of donations from the charity she was working at (or running it was hard for me to make sense of) being emptied. She’s been coined The Bride of the Grinch, and is trying to have zero social presence as she rebuilds her life. She also is partner in a fledgling cat cafe, with her BFF and biz partner Charity.
Next we have Ben Reese. A transplanted Bostontonian trying to run from his family. Of which they sound insanely manipulative and terrible. His fiancee leaves him to quickly elope with his younger brother and then gets pregnant almost right away. He’s trying to get some space from them all (which like YES, and MAKES TOTAL SENSE TO ME), but his parents and siblings are not respecting his boundaries and are emotionally blackmailing him into giving his forgiveness away and just, I dunno GETTING OVER IT?
And while Gary does a good enough job getting me to feel a little bad for both of these ding-dongs, I just could got get into it enough to care. Ben at times is high-handed (hello just making a whole marketing plan for the cafe with zero input from the partners) and then kinda problematic (HE HATES ANIMALS?!) oh and he has a metric f*ck-ton of emotional baggage from his past relationships (case in point each time he essentially flies off the handle with jealousy around Adam). And ok he does adopt Chaos but it’s all in the telling and nothing in the showing. We get essentially no real time with him or the cat wherein he can take that terrible attitude about animals and figure out where it’s coming from…
And Kara is deeply traumatized from her stint in the spotlight and being villainized in the court of public opinion. She gets pushed a lot throughout by both Ben and Charity (BFF and Biz Partner) to put herself back out there, because the ex is getting out of jail soon and he’s been sending her letters and calling, something bad this way comes.
Much like There’s Something About Merry, A Cat Cafe Christmas suffers from a whole lot of plots and conflict but also Trinity The Tuck voice where are the jokes? Where is the romance? Maybe the real lesson I’m learning this year is that I’m the grinch who can’t read holiday romances in 80 degree weather? Huh. Maybe. Both of these crazy kids need therapy, I’m hoping Santa brings them some.
There is a slog of a third act break-up, and with some magic wand waving things all kind of sort themselves out, but reader when I tell you, there is no world where these two are in it for the long haul, maybe a 2-3 year run TOPS. Ben, we were rooting for you. We were all rooting for you.
Like the ramblings above suggest, this one just missed the mark for me. But that does not mean it won’t work for you! If you’re interested in checking out A Cat Cafe Christmas, grab yourself a copy wherever you get your books when it hits stores October 4th 2022!