Love in Winter Wonderland by Abiola Bello

Welcome Back, Booklovers! I wanted to squeeze in one more Christmas romance before December ended and Love in Winter Wonderland looked so cute because we rarely get Black YA romance set at Christmas. Two years ago when I decided to restart this blog I started by covering Love Secret Santa by SA Domingo(also known as Sareeta Domingo) which is also a UK YA. There's definitely a big gap that needs filling here so I was glad to see another entry.

Trey's family owns a bookshop called Wonderland. Sales have been down and his mother is strongly considering selling the shop. A disaster plan to earn money lands them further in debt with Trey scrambling for ideas to save the shop. Ariel is an artist who goes to his college and she needs a seasonal job to make some extra money for a special course. The two of them come up with ways to get the shop more attention and even catch the eye of celebrities like Rihanna. They start vibing but Trey has a longtime girlfriend Blair still in the picture.

Usually when I read books by Black British authors set in the UK the writing style is a little different and there's vernacular they use that I have to get used to. There were words sprinkled in here but it really felt no different than a US YA. Which was interesting because this was published strictly in the UK for a Black British audience. We didn't get any unique to their families or cultural traditions for Christmas. Which I would've liked to see. Most likely the characters have African or Caribbean roots but we never got a mention of that.

I did enjoy that each chapter started with a song from a playlist of Christmas songs by Black artists. And the setting was perfect with Christmas spirit in the air and plenty of mulled wine to go around.

The book starts off very cute and I enjoyed plot of them working together to save the book shop. Though this book was advertised as enemies to lovers they were never enemies or even rivals. They vaguely know each other from school and Trey is in his feeling about the shop and unnecessarily takes out his frustrations on Ariel. That's quickly cleared up!

I  thought that Trey and Ariel had nice chemistry and I would've liked to see them spend some more time together without his girlfriend being the elephant in the room. I could've done with Trey having a girlfriend for the first a few chapters or the first half at most but we were less than 100 pages until the end of the book when he finally broke up with Blair which broke up the momentum on the book.

His emotional cheating lessened the cuter moments in the book and cheapened when they eventually get together because as his parents told him he shouldn't be jumping from girl to girl. I feel like Bello tries to justify Trey's emotional cheating because his girlfriend is a bitch but that says more about him and why he was with her for so long. And he does things like forget his girlfriend's birthday, dance with other girl's at a party for her, and keep secrets from her.

At one point it felt like the drama was dragging out the ending even though there was so much going on with the bookshop, Ariel wanting to get into the art course, Trey getting over his fear of public singing, and Ariel dealing with the mean girls at school and her issues with her weight. More could've been focused on that versus the drama with Blair. Especially since Trey doesn't break up with her until she does something especially heinous.

Cute story overall I just found that the romance was overshadowed because Bello felt Trey needed a  girlfriend for drama and angst.