The magic carpet at the sledding hill moves slowly, which is the point. Each time it hauls the sled back up the slope, Nolan Hart uses the ride to tell Taran Taylor something he knows about her. Her birthday and her star sign. The way she hates lateness because time cannot be refunded. The fact that she would rather watch a person die in a film than a horse. She has no answer for any of it, because she had assumed for five years that her fiancé’s younger brother was too busy admiring himself to notice anyone else. Christmas Staycation by Meghan Quinn keeps most of its jokes below the belt, but this scene, a third of the way in, is the one that explains why the romance works.
The situation around it is pure farce. Taran and Guy Hart have been broken up for a month without telling a soul. When their parents descend on Kringle, the Colorado town where it is always Christmas, the family decides a Christmas Eve wedding would be just the thing for a great-aunt who seems to be failing. The couple agree to stage one and skip the paperwork. Nolan, who arrives unannounced and works out the truth almost at once, sees an opening.
The Man Who Was Listening
Nolan is written as a walking innuendo. He wears crop tops and a fanny pack, calls Taran babe in every other line and treats a festive cookie as an opportunity. Readers who find that tiring will find a lot of it here. But Quinn is clever about what lies under the act. He makes friendship bracelets in secret and carries the memory of a childhood friend who died young, and he has been collecting small facts about Taran since the night they met. The seduction in Christmas Staycation by Meghan Quinn is less about his body, though the book spends plenty of time on that, than about the shock of being seen.
Taran is the right foil for him. She is a nurse who no longer likes her job and an older sister who has spent her life stepping back so that Storee could have what she wanted. Her precision is played for comedy, but Quinn lets it carry real loneliness too. The scenes where she lets go, three cocktails deep at Prancer’s Libations or simply trying a fountain drink with every flavour mixed in, are small and well judged.
Guy Steals Christmas Staycation
The surprise of the novel is the fiancé. Guy could have been a punchline, the man who stirs a cup of hot cocoa twenty times clockwise, twenty times anticlockwise and then in a figure eight. He is that man. But he also gets his own chapters, and they are the funniest in Christmas Staycation by Meghan Quinn, written in a voice of panicked formality that collapses whenever anyone challenges him. His sudden campaign to reclaim a fiancée he had already let go is pitiful and very human, and Quinn rewards him with a path of his own rather than a humiliation.
The supporting cast does the rest. A Jell-O course ends up on a mother’s face in one of the best dinner-table disasters in recent romance. Two pairs of parents squabble over the king-size bed, a sleep apnoea machine with a name and a cat with an entourage of equipment. The series’ usual narrator, shoved aside by Nolan in the opening pages, keeps creeping back to sniff at the story’s manners. That joke never develops beyond a sparring match, but it reads like a writer enjoying herself.
Where the Charade Comes Apart
For all its pleasures, Christmas Staycation by Meghan Quinn takes a shortcut with its own premise. The whole pretence rests on protecting a fragile relative and keeping a family Christmas intact. When the truth finally surfaces, the reason for the deception is dismissed with a joke, and in hindsight the stakes feel thinner than the book let on. A climactic public confession on the front lawn is gloriously chaotic, but it settles everything too quickly.
It is also a long book for a romantic comedy, running past four hundred pages, and the length shows. The same comic beat is asked to land again and again: Nolan announces his desire in the crudest available terms, Taran rolls her eyes, and the narration notes how much he enjoyed it. Late on, a newcomer from Nolan’s past arrives to stir up jealousy, and the novel restages that tension several times without moving it on. Taran’s conviction that the romance cannot survive the distance between Colorado and California returns in much the same words each time. A tighter edit would have lost nothing but repetition.
There is a pattern, too, in how Taran’s problems get solved. Her unhappiness at work, one of the book’s quietly affecting threads, is resolved by Nolan more than by Taran herself. His jealousy, which Taran calls toxic in one scene and then smiles about, will charm some readers and unsettle others. And one late chapter cuts between the leads and an equally explicit scene for a secondary couple, which readers who come for the main pairing may want to skim.
Prospective readers should know the book’s limits plainly: explicit sex, possessive desire, grief from childhood, heavy drinking and near-constant profanity all feature, and the tone is never coy.
Meghan Quinn’s Three Christmases in Kringle
Christmas Staycation by Meghan Quinn is the third visit to the town, after How My Neighbor Stole Christmas introduced Storee and Cole and Merry Christmas, You Filthy Animal paired Max with Betty. Those couples wander through as friends and gossips, and Max in particular is reliably useless with a secret, but nothing important depends on having read them. It is the most adult of the three and the most confident about its comedy. Newcomers can open Christmas Staycation by Meghan Quinn without feeling stranded: a few brisk early pages establish the town, the two sisters and the sham ceremony, and the in-jokes carried over from earlier winters are either glossed on the spot or easy to let pass.
Its author has published more than fifty novels across a dozen series, from the Almond Bay small-town books to the Cane Brothers billionaire comedies, and she has built her name on precisely this blend of fake relationships, rivals and very open-door sex. She and her wife are adoptive parents of two children, and the book’s warmest scenes are about the family you choose to keep showing up for.
Final Thoughts
Christmas Staycation by Meghan Quinn is out now. It shares its release day with Abby Jimenez’s A Married Little Christmas, a natural next pick for readers who want a holiday romance with more tenderness and fewer jokes. Readers after steam with their tinsel might also try Holidating by Sarina Bowen, a trio of short, spicy holiday stories.
The book is too long, too repetitive in its jokes and too eager to forgive itself. It is also generous, deeply silly and, in the end, about a woman who finally lets someone carry the lights for her while Nolan’s Airstream idles at the kerb.