Book Review: Have Yourself a Crazy Little Christmas by Megan Crane

Book Review: Have Yourself a Crazy Little Christmas (The Greys of Montana #5) by Megan Crane

Rating: 4 Stars

 

Expected publication: November 15th 2017 by Tule Publishing
Summary: Dependable Devyn Voss is no stranger to cleaning up her mother’s messes, but this one’s gone supernova. In search of love, her flighty mom has invited all of her exes to celebrate her Christmastime 50th birthday. Which is trouble enough, but only gets worse when Devyn’s former stepbrother shows up to the party. His dark brown eyes and lazy smile still setting sparks off inside of Devyn that she’s desperate to ignore.

Nashville songwriter Vaughn Taylor only came to the party to support his dad. And if he happens to see his pretty ex-stepsister there, that’s just fine. But the minute he lays eyes on her, he’s gripped by all his old desires--to undo all her uptight and get past that guarded exterior.

They were never supposed to see each other again, but now that they have--all those sparks have become a bonfire. But will this little bit of Christmas crazy last... or will it end with the season?
(from Goodreads)


Review: I love the dynamic between Devyn and Vaughn. And I love Vaughn, period. I love his sexy Cowboy-ness, his honey whiskey voice with its southern drawl that I can practically hear as I read the pages, his casual throwin' around of southern slang and the word darlin'… Yum. Him being 6'4" seems a little excessively tall though. I have a brother-in-law who is about that tall and he's TALL. And I suppose I relate to Devyn as well, as someone who was always a "good girl" and never really did anything wild (though thankfully my Mom is NOT like Melody AT ALL! Dad is a tattooed biker dude though… Hmm…)

Partway through the book Devyn meets up with her cousins and there is way too much of what I assume is recap from the first four books in the series. I found myself skimming through this waiting to get back to what I thought of as the "real" storyline. I suppose there are spoilers there for the first four books, but it's all thrown at you in such a big blob of word-vomit that I honestly couldn't tell you what the other storylines are, other than that they seem to have little to no bearing on the storyline for this book. So while this is the 5th book in a series, it can be read as a stand-alone with possible spoilers for the earlier books, but you're not missing anything by not reading them.

Aside from the little chapter and a half where Devyn is catching up with her cousins and the author feels the need to bash the reader over the head with the history of all the Grey Cousins, Have Yourself A Crazy Little Christmas is really well written, in a style that's fun and flirty. It's a quick read with lots of holiday family craziness against the festive backdrop of a Montana ski town at Christmas. It also has several poignant moments, several beautiful ones, and several the glisten like snowflakes falling in the twinkling Christmas lights. I originally deducted two stars for all the Grey Family Saga stuff that cluttered up the story, but gave one back for all the beautiful moments that followed and tugged at something deep in my chest. (See what this book did to me? It got me waxing all poetic. Dang.)

*I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.