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The Christmas Fling

por Heidi Cullinan

Séries: Christmas Town (1)

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1811,184,285 (3.6)1
Sometimes it takes a village to fall in love.Eccentric, reclusive, socially awkward project designer Evan Myles doesn't date. Paying for sex with professionals is so much more efficient and suits his needs well enough. But when he's on assignment in rural Logan, Minnesota, for the Christmas Town project and a handsome stranger at the bar catches his attention, Evan decides it's time to break his rule. It doesn't matter that he's never so much as flirted before. It can't be that hard, can it?Davidson Incorporated lead architect Terry Reid hasn't been hit on so clumsily in his life. Terry's the first to admit he's a neurotic Prince Charming, and he's kissed his share of frogs of both genders, but he's never met anyone quite like Evan Myles. Evan calls Terry by the wrong name, mistakes Terry for a simple construction worker, and picks apart his work as an architect. Despite this rough start, Terry is lured by the brilliance of Evan's ideas, his quirky personality, and once they're alone in Evan's cabin, the man's mad skills in bed. Yet Terry knows it takes more than a single night of passion to make a relationship work, and after so many failures, he's just not ready to try again.Evan and Terry's path is strewn with stones neither of them can dislodge. Fortunately, they're not alone on the road to romance. They're in Christmas Town, home to matchmakers, meddlers, and more "fairy godfathers" than they could possibly know what to do with.Most importantly, in Logan, Minnesota, happy ever after is guaranteed.… (mais)
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Arg. As usual, Cullinan excels at individual scenes of high emotion and at portraying male friendship. She's also particularly good at what I think of as realistic aspirational world building: her characters tend to live in worlds that are just a little kinder and more accepting than our own, but those worlds are perfectly realistic, if only we could get our collective shite together. Her stories exist in the world her characters deserve rather than the one their real-world counterparts would probably encounter. I *love* that. But on the whole this story mostly didn't work for me.

After we briefly meet the main characters, it begins with a long sex scene which left me really uncomfortable, and not in a way that I thought was useful. Terry, one of the heroes allows the other, Evan, to persist in mistaking his identity throughout the encounter despite knowing that they will have to work together soon professionally. And their encounter goes to emotionally fraught places without any prior discussion of boundaries or how to communicate within the encounter. Given how deeply submissive one of the heroes got during the encounter, this nearly squicked me into skimming the scene. All this is foundational to the story Cullinan was telling, but I dunno. It didn't sit right.

Then there was the pacing. For the first half of the book I thought the story was going to be about the fallout from Terry not telling Evan who he really was and then Evan not realizing that Terry was the guy he had a one-night stand with at all. And I was into that plot, thinking it would be an interesting thing to explore, how you get trust back after that. But then that sort of got resolved and the story became about how Terry has trouble with emotional intimacy. Okaaay. That's fine, but what about a solid resolution for the first issue? Very near the end of the book, Terry freaked out and ran away from Evan (like, hundreds of miles away), and all sorts of little pieces of the plot really started to rub me the wrong way. After calming down from the immediate panic of seeing Terry have a minor breakdown and run away from him, Evan decides he won't contact Terry because he wants him to come back on his own. That makes sense, but also? You're in a steady, shacked-up-together relationship with someone for six months and you're cool with just not having any contact for four weeks while you wait to see if they're going to come back? Really? That feels weird to me. Meanwhile, Terry's friend Levi has a brother who is a therapist. Who is apparently willing not only to intervene while Terry is in crisis (this I buy) but to continue helping him through therapy after that, outside of a professional relationship. I call shenanigans on this. Where are his professional boundaries? He diagnoses Terry with anxiety, which I can accept from his behavior in the book, but anxiety is not, surely, based on what we've seen of him, what caused Terry to sabotage all his relationships, at least not solely. But we never really get to see Terry figure out and resolve the issue that has been sitting in the middle of his relationship with Evan: his fear of allowing another person get emotionally intimate with him. (He also becomes super self-aware and develops an emotionally healthy plan for moving forward in all of his relationships *really* fast after getting some therapy. Three weeks? Maybe four? That is some next level therapy he has going on there.)

Finally, I hated the climax of the book. Narratively, the story uses Terry's inability to say "I love you" as a symbol of the obstacles between him and Evan. (There's more to it than that, but that's the story kernel that stands for the all of it.) In the end, Terry puts together a grand gesture which involves him putting up in Christmas lights in town "I love you, Evan." Blerg. Not being able to admit to his feelings *in public* was not the crux of his issue. He can't say it in an intimate setting when he and his lover are sharing a vulnerable, emotional moment. How does this grand gesture demonstrate that he's over that? *frustrated face*

So. Great stuff around the story--setting, minor characters, the scenes of high emotion taken on their own--all fantastic. But the story didn't hold together for me. It felt maybe a little rushed, like all the pieces aren't slotted together right just yet. (The proofreading was also not stellar.) A disappointing addition to Cullinan's Christmas stories about Logan, Minnesota, though enjoyable in part. ( )
  lycomayflower | Dec 20, 2017 |
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Sometimes it takes a village to fall in love.Eccentric, reclusive, socially awkward project designer Evan Myles doesn't date. Paying for sex with professionals is so much more efficient and suits his needs well enough. But when he's on assignment in rural Logan, Minnesota, for the Christmas Town project and a handsome stranger at the bar catches his attention, Evan decides it's time to break his rule. It doesn't matter that he's never so much as flirted before. It can't be that hard, can it?Davidson Incorporated lead architect Terry Reid hasn't been hit on so clumsily in his life. Terry's the first to admit he's a neurotic Prince Charming, and he's kissed his share of frogs of both genders, but he's never met anyone quite like Evan Myles. Evan calls Terry by the wrong name, mistakes Terry for a simple construction worker, and picks apart his work as an architect. Despite this rough start, Terry is lured by the brilliance of Evan's ideas, his quirky personality, and once they're alone in Evan's cabin, the man's mad skills in bed. Yet Terry knows it takes more than a single night of passion to make a relationship work, and after so many failures, he's just not ready to try again.Evan and Terry's path is strewn with stones neither of them can dislodge. Fortunately, they're not alone on the road to romance. They're in Christmas Town, home to matchmakers, meddlers, and more "fairy godfathers" than they could possibly know what to do with.Most importantly, in Logan, Minnesota, happy ever after is guaranteed.

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Heidi Cullinan é um Autor LibraryThing, um autor que lista a sua biblioteca pessoal no LibraryThing.

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