The Twelve Dates of Christmas

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Bayliss, Jenny
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Bayliss, Jenny	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"When it comes to relationships, thirty-four-year-old Kate Turner is ready to say "Bah, humbug." The sleepy town of Blexford, England, isn't exactly brimming with prospects, and anyway, Kate's found fulfillment in her career as a designer, and in her delicious side job baking for her old friend Matt's neighborhood café. But then her best friend signs her up for a dating agency that promises to help singles find love before the holidays. Twenty-three days until Christmas. Twelve dates with twelve different men. The odds must finally be in her favor... right? Yet with each new date more disastrous than the one before--and the whole town keeping tabs on her misadventures--Kate must remind herself that sometimes love, like mistletoe, shows up where it's least expected. And maybe, just maybe, it's been right under her nose all along..."-- Provided by publisher.

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I REALLY Wanted to Like This. But... submitted by Meginator on June 11, 2023, 6:18pm This Christmas-themed romance novel is built around a fun gimmick that is executed quite well throughout the course of the story, but unfortunately the central romance is underdeveloped, existing more by reputation and expectation than by the actual narrative and character development on the page. While main character Kate Turner is easy enough to root for, she is also somewhat bland, with no particularly distinguishing characteristics and no real internal journey as her quest for love progresses; her main flaw appears to be her attraction to multiple men who insist on controlling the parameters of their romantic relationships, but I’m not sure the author is aware of this given that one of them is the male romantic lead. Bayliss obviously intends for the primary couple to have a relationship built on mutual verbal sparring that masks deep care and concern, which is theoretically (and often in practice) a great way to introduce and develop a friends-to-lovers dynamic, but Kate’s central love interest, Matt, is overly focused on devaluing her for going on dates with multiple men and has a tendency to single-handedly dictate the terms of their friendship (like, whether they are even speaking to one another). I suspect that the point here is to illustrate how much he cares for her, but in a book that calls attention several times to blatant misogyny it feels like yet another series of red flags and like possessiveness instead of actual love. Moreover, Kate’s own development feels scattershot: she begins the book relatively content to be single, but ends it somewhat desperate to find a relationship. But despite the fact that the main romance is uninteresting and lacks tension (it is transparently telegraphed on page one and lacks the necessary underpinning emotional development), and despite the author’s taste for rambling exposition that adds little to the story, the book does have its bright spots with the titular twelve dates; the conceit is a good way to organize the plot and Bayliss comes up with a nice range of activities and men that continually offer something new in a book with a somewhat stale romantic core. She also tosses in a number of excellent one-liners and douses the book in Christmas spirit, which significantly improves (but ultimately cannot redeem) an otherwise drab outing. In fact, Kate’s only moments of true chemistry in the book come with her new gay best friend and, remarkably and surely unintentionally, with Matt’s girlfriend. In the end, though, this book lacks the necessary character development that makes romance novels work, and without a notable protagonist or a lovable love interest all of its potential charm instead falls flat.

enjoyed this submitted by gw on August 1, 2023, 12:29pm The baking descriptions made me crave gooey brownies but luckily there are some recipes in the back to recreate some of the baked goods described in the book. I enjoyed the story and liked the main characters. Predictable of course but it went a little deeper than some romances go.