A Date with Santa by Debbie Macomber

 

We can always count on Debbie Macomber to get us in the holiday spirit. In A Date with Santa, Clare, an ambitious ad exec is in the running for the management position at her firm. All she has to do is beat her competition, Troy, who is not as good as she is. She has to be careful not to give him anything to derail her though.

She’s gone on a couple of dates with the Account Manager, Ethan and while she really likes him, decides to put the brakes on their relationship so Troy can’t argue “office romance.”

What she doesn’t count on is being called on to babysit her young nephew, Ricky, while his mother is deployed for disaster relief through the holiday. Unable to turn her down, Clare learns that there is more to taking care of a young boy than microwave meals and Uber Eats.

One person is a natural though, and that’s Ethan. As Clare determines to make it Ricky’s best Christmas, her own values and emotions are charged up by the Christmas spirit.

 

A Date with Santa will be released October 13, 2026, by Ballantine. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for helping me get in the mood for holidays with this early review copy.

Christmas at Honeycombe Bay

   

Christmas at Honeycombe Bay by Lilac Mills is a sweet holiday romance featuring senior citizen main characters!  Eloise decides to find a place to sit out Christmas, feeling bad about her life after being made redundant in her longtime job. She never took time for a family of her own, and her parents are long past.  She seeks out Honeycombe Bay, where she’d spent a pleasant summer holiday, and is delighted to find that her BnB choice has no intention of celebrating Christmas. 

Bart, the owner of the Bnb, has nearly given up on …everything.  His wife of nearly forty years has been gone for two years, and he’s not opened up the BnB since she got sick.  His son, Ross, is urging him to sell, but all Bart’s memories live in the huge old house.  When he picks up the phone just before Christmas, he expects it to be Ross, but instead it is Eloise.  Since she wants a no-Christmas holiday, and since Bart needs the money, he agrees to rent her a room for three weeks.

All goes well between the two of them until a fire leaves a sweet young woman and her young son homeless.  Christmas spirit revives in the characters, and the holiday works its magic.

Christmas at Honeycombe Bay will be released September 29, 2026, by Ballantine/Dell.  Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy.

 

 

The Brightness by Chad Harbach

 

 

Chad Harbach returns to fictitious Westish College, first visited in his debut novel, The Art of Fielding. While the two books contain overlapping characters, the focus of The Brightness is not on the male relationships we loved in The Art of Fielding, but on women.

While the writing was splendid, only the strength of the words and my memory of how loving the first novel kept me reading. Centered on three primary women, Pella, Irma and Judy were so complex and well-drawn that they each deserved our full attention. But we are introduced to these women as a unit, and I just didn’t buy it. They were too different for me to believe in their authenticity, their great literary salon-type connection, and as it turns out, neither did they. By the end of the book, the bosom buddies sabotage one another, in ways that felt frankly, more male than female.

This novel nearly 700 pages, and maybe that’s why it lost me. The author tries so hard to cover popular culture, feminist issues, academic, sports, Bro culture and even an over-the-top wedding that I just felt we’d drifted into fantasy land. Adding “cute” metafiction aspects (Using his own book as the book of one of the main characters?) felt like the author was trying hard to remind me that he’d done this before.  It actually made me go back and read Harbach’s biography to see if he’d actually inserted himself in the book along with his bestseller.

In short, the writing kept me reading; the story left me annoyed.

The Brightness will be released October 27,2026, by Little Brown and Company. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced review copy.

 

 

Pining for You by Stef Ferrari

   

Pining for You by Stef Ferrari

Bennie is a high school senior who believes in magic, especially Christmas magic. When she stumbles into a lovely girl while working at the local Christmas tree farm, she is convinced that the sparkles she feels are those of true love. Magical true love. With the assistance of her three best friends, she sets off on a quest to find the stranger, and perhaps her own purpose for the future. The four of them encounter enough obstacles to fit any romance lover’s expectation.

This queer holiday romance will be released September 8, 2026, by Simon and Schuster Children’s publishing. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.